This is pretty much what hynek was on about (see my comment below) and what the guys at Parcel are doing (Iam a johnny come lately with pyholodeck) but we are trying to do the same thing - build once, package into apt/deb and deploy many times.
I think the argument above (boss runs different OS) is a fallacy - you want to deploy to the same target OS, probably in the cloud, so optimise for that first then fiddle with different OS. I guarantee people will prefer deploying a cloud server and logging in "just to see" and be happy with manually bringing things up with `setup.py develop` locally.
The code I write is a framework for testers and developers, though. So it won't run on many similar machines but on many very individual machines. But I guess it might even be possible to transform APT/RPM packages in each other and my guess would be that even yum can read one or the other, even if it's not its main package format (don't know Fedora very well).
You guys really got me excited about this. If I can get any air soon, I'll try to learn more about it!
I think the argument above (boss runs different OS) is a fallacy - you want to deploy to the same target OS, probably in the cloud, so optimise for that first then fiddle with different OS. I guarantee people will prefer deploying a cloud server and logging in "just to see" and be happy with manually bringing things up with `setup.py develop` locally.