So Perl had the same sort of problem—everyone used the cpan client to install packages by wrapping the calls to perl Makefile.PL make make test

So Perl had the same sort of problem—everyone used the cpan client to install packages by wrapping the calls to perl Makefile.PL make make test make install And package authors would use helper modules to handle the Makefile.PL cruft[0][1]. It sucked. rbjs wrote Dist::Zilla[2], a packaging abstraction tool: you would tell it what was in your package, and it would write the installer for you (and you could choose which of the Makefile.PL helpers to use, if you cared). The end user never sees any remnant of the tool. The closest Python has right now is pbr[3]. [0] https://metacpan.org/pod/ExtUtils::MakeMaker https://metacpan.org/pod/ExtUtils::MakeMaker [1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Module::Install https://metacpan.org/pod/Module::Install [2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Dist::Zilla https://metacpan.org/pod/Dist::Zilla [3] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/pbr/ http://docs.openstack.org/developer/pbr/