I have never personally used buildout so I can't speak about it pro or con. It always seemed a bit heavy handed to me but that's an uninformed opinion. I also

I have never personally used buildout so I can't speak about it pro or con. It always seemed a bit heavy handed to me but that's an uninformed opinion. I also think the idea of packaging to egg files is somewhat unneeded. When I use pip, I use cheeseshop for the more established frameworks I depend on (Django, south, etc...) but I also use pip to pull directly from various git repos. When I package my own projects for use, I just drop a setup.py script in there and then install from github using pip. Looking at my requirements.txt for my main project, I have about 10 dependencies from cheeseshop and about 10 pulling from various git or bitbucket repos.