[moving to disutils-sig where this belongs] Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

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where type of problem == sandboxed environment, sure. How do you solve the problem for system packagers? What's to stop a system packager either just running the buildout on install, or running the buildout at package build time and then just dropping the resulting environment wherever they want to install applications? Such a package would only be dependent on the right python version at runtime...

If buildout creates sandboxed environments like virtualenv then everything here applies:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries

That's fine, buildout can use a shared eggs directory (it's how I run it by default, to minimise the amount of downloading that goes on). In that case, there would be no duplication of packages, the "installed app" would just pick from a folder full of eggs that you could put wherever your OS wants them... In short, have multiple versions of a python package on the python path at the same time is insane ;-) Chris -- Simplistix - Content Management, Batch Processing & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk