That makes sense. What I did in the past was include wheels of the project itself and all dependencies (pip download) in the RPM/deb, then create the virtualenv

That makes sense. What I did in the past was include wheels of the project itself and all dependencies (pip download) in the RPM/deb, then create the virtualenv and install dependencies as a post-install script. You could upgrade dependencies by calling pip install -U from the virtualenv, however any time you installed the RPM/deb it would "reset" to the packaged version (though there should be ways to prevent that, e.g. tell pip to never downgrade packages).