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Note: this post isn't PA-specific, but I thought it might be of interest to the community here.

For a long time I have lamented the fact that, unlike Ruby, Python doesn't ship with a particularly good package management solution. On hosted services like PA this isn't a big issue because the PA devs have done a great job setting it all up to Just Work™. However, it would be nice if it weren't so much effort to get to that point.

Fortunately it appears that the Python developers have finally realised this as I've just noticed a couple of really promising developments in this area.

Firstly, it appears that virtualenv is now included as standard with Python 3.3, which is great. This should make it easier for people to use and allow tighter integration with Python, making sure Python upgrades don't break things in future.

Secondly, I've just discovered PEP 439 which is proposing the inclusion of a bootstrap script in the standard distribution to allow the use of pip. This isn't quite the same as including pip itself, but it should make life an awful lot easier for some people, especially Windows users, where installation of pip is rather awkward.

Good to see things are improving!

totally agree this is one of the biggest problems with Python atm. I was trying to write a quick setup guide for windows in my TDD book, and it's a huge PITA.