The State of Packaging & Dependency Management

Python now has a mature and easy-to-use dependency management and isolation tools in the form of Virtualenv and Pip/Pyg. All applications should be using these. In this talk, we'll see why using Virtualenv + Pip or Pyg brings a plethora of benefits, from ramping up new developers to automation in the cloud. Key points and take aways will include:

• Getting new developers set up with an app and with python is much easier when dependencies are declared through the standard format of requirements.txt.
• Explicit dependency declaration enables rapid bootstrapping and deployment to the cloud.
• Dependency management for python rightly belongs within python! You can manage dependencies with Chef or Puppet, but this is a Python app -- let's do it with Python.
• How the Python community can continue to support these tools and improve the tools to make the experience even better than it is today.

In summary, you're crazy if you're not completely and explicitly declaring your dependencies with Pip or Pyg and isolating them with Virtualenv.