I completely agree. I've worked at the large companies where we were stuck with Python 2.5 because of LTS versions of distros in production (around 2010).
I work at Continuum using our Python distribution (Anaconda[1] and Miniconda[2]). We sell it as the Data Scientist's answer to python, but as a sysadmin, I really think it is the answer administrators have been looking for. It installs into one directory that can be blown away if needed. It provides virtualenv-like environments except it you can isolate different versions of python or any binary. You can "activate" your environment, just by setting your PATH to find the env's bin first.
The conda package manager installs binary packages, so you don't need to compile c-extensions on each machine. Conda allows you to build all of your packages for each arch. Binstar is our alpha package hosting service that lets you host packages and it has a multi-platform build service (super-alpha). And you aren't limited to Binstar if you want to host your own repos -- the commands are built into conda.
If you want to distribute non-python binaries, you can do that as well. I'm using conda to install node and node packages. I really like using conda for node binaries, because I can build them using npm and then I have a way to push versioned node binaries to production. (Internally, we've built most of the R packages, postgres, mysql, mongo, nginx as conda packages to provide non-root users a way to install normally root-only software).
I work at Continuum using our Python distribution (Anaconda[1] and Miniconda[2]). We sell it as the Data Scientist's answer to python, but as a sysadmin, I really think it is the answer administrators have been looking for. It installs into one directory that can be blown away if needed. It provides virtualenv-like environments except it you can isolate different versions of python or any binary. You can "activate" your environment, just by setting your PATH to find the env's bin first.
The conda package manager installs binary packages, so you don't need to compile c-extensions on each machine. Conda allows you to build all of your packages for each arch. Binstar is our alpha package hosting service that lets you host packages and it has a multi-platform build service (super-alpha). And you aren't limited to Binstar if you want to host your own repos -- the commands are built into conda.
If you want to distribute non-python binaries, you can do that as well. I'm using conda to install node and node packages. I really like using conda for node binaries, because I can build them using npm and then I have a way to push versioned node binaries to production. (Internally, we've built most of the R packages, postgres, mysql, mongo, nginx as conda packages to provide non-root users a way to install normally root-only software).
[1] Anaconda: http://continuum.io/downloads [2] Just python: http://conda.pydata.org/miniconda.html#miniconda