Talking of stow, I take advantage of this thread to do some shameless advertising :) Recently I uploaded to PyPI a software of mine, BPT [1], which does the same symlinking trick of stow, but it is written in Python (and with a simple api) and, more importantly, it allows with another trick the relocation of the installation directory (it creates a semi- isolated environment, similar to virtualenv). I find it very convenient when I have to switch between several versions of the same packages (for example during development), or I have to deploy on the same machine software that needs different versions of the dependencies. I am planning to write an integration layer with buildout and easy_install. It should be very easy, since BPT can handle directly tarballs (and directories, in trunk) which contain a setup.py. HTH, Giuseppe [1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bpt P.S. I was not aware of stow, I'll add it to the references and see if there are any features that I can steal