I've recently started using Git to manage the Python installations on my system (2.4, 2.5, 2.6 etc.),, and I have found that it has revolutionized my development ecosystem. Full versioning + documentation of all changes to each of the frameworks (including reversion in case something breaks), multiple parallel variants/package combinations of each installation (including a clean vanilla build) with seamless in-situ switching among them, easy instantiation and disposal of sandbox/experimental branches, etc. etc. I've written more about it here: http://jeetworks.org/node/24 It probably lies outside the purview of the development of Python itself (as opposed to Python development), but I thought I share this with you because I find it so useful! Furthermore, as I mention at the end of the above-referenced post, at the moment the big downside to this approach is the extra book-keeping burden that falls on the user. So much of this can be automated, though, with a distutils or setuptools post-install hook ... so maybe that might be something to consider?