Cheers -Brian

I hope you use your real name next time, so I can thank you properly.

2. I always laugh seeing non-hyperlinked footnotes on the web. What’s the point?

Buildout is nice in that it is declarative, while with virtualenv is more REPL-like. As a programmer I like my sources to live in text files. I’m usually afraid that I can forget what packages I’ve easy_installed (or pip installed) and why. When I’m using virtualenv, I usually have a develop.sh that rm -rf’s my local virtualenv, recreates it, and installs the required dependencies/dev tools into it. Buildout is typically faster than this kind of full-reinstall, since it remembers what it had and compares that with the current version of buildout.cfg before applying changes. On the other hand easy_installing a single ad-hoc development tool is faster when you’ve got a virtualenv, since adding a single package to a buildout.cfg and running bin/buildout can easily cause it to burn CPU for 10-20 seconds before it decides what it needs to change. Also, writing a buildout.cfg is a bit of a black art where cargo-culting works best — mostly because anything interesting is done by plugins, with varying quality of docs, and the added difficulty of finding a plugin to do what you need.

One thing that I like better about virtualenv is that you can use the interpreters it creates in, e.g., PyDev, and your project’s dependencies can automatically be loaded for auto-completion, etc. With buildout, the “interpreter” is just a shell script that “calls” the actual interpreter after modifying sys.path, and I haven’t been able to get this to automagically work with PyDev–I have to manually add a project’s dependencies in PyDev’s config.