If you are using pip and virtualenv (which are currently understood as "best practice" in the Python world), it's as simple as running "pip install PACKAGE==VER

If you are using pip and virtualenv (which are currently understood as "best practice" in the Python world), it's as simple as running "pip install PACKAGE==VERSION" (or, better, adding "PACKAGE==VERSION" to your requirements.txt file). Even if it was expected that people would frequently fork their own version and drop it in their application, a package is still just be a directory with a few .py files. Hardly an issue for version control systems or even setuptools, and it has the advantage that your application code is separated from the forked framework code.