[Chicago] import question

[Pete]

On Wednesday January 23 2008 12:10:42 pm Kumar McMillan wrote:
> BTW ... I think bundling dependencies is a smart idea and I wish it
> were a bit easier to do in Python.  Imagine a production server where
> you have 10 apps deployed and you want to upgrade a global package;
> this is a regression test nightmare that no matter how talented your
> QA team is will be very very hard to get right.  At my company we have
> a tool that uses setuptools to make a local package of eggs per
> application but it's still a hack of sorts and is prone to breakage
> when setuptools changes.

I believe that's what Ian's workingenv.py/virtualenv.py are supposed to do.  
They seem to work well for a few people, and not for others.

@work, we've generally found global upgrades to not be much of a problem.  In 
a few rare instances we've wanted to continue to use a really old version of 
a package, we've imported the beastie into our subversion and set PYTHONPATH 
on a per-application basis in our shell wrapper scripts.

> Of course, the industry standard solution to this (Amazon does this I
> believe) is to use vmware to create one single "OS" per application,
> for ultimate isolation.  If you have that luxury then this is the way
> to go.

There are a lot of other nice benefits of doing so as well, it would seem...

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