So my problem is that while my protocol stack spins up very nicely and trivially easy using the twistd daemon, the standard python3-twisted package for 14.04 is waaaay behind and doesn't include twistd (!), and I haven't found a good backport.  I'd also like to avoid doing things that make life hard for DevOps, such as pip3 installing and risking a package manager fight.

The general solution to this problem is "don't use the system Python environment to deploy your applications".

This is what virtualenv is for.

Yes, well, the standard practice around here is to wrap up deliverables in a .deb so that the DevOps tools can do automated deploys.  I suppose it is possible to wrap up a venv in a .deb, but I’ve never done looked into it. Pointers welcome.

https://github.com/spotify/dh-virtualenv and https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deployment-with-native-packages/ come to mind.

N.B. the article is by me and I’m currently migrating to Docker/Nomad.  But it served us very well for many years.