To those asking how this differs from virtualenv: it's meant to compliment it. When you setup a new virtualenv, you can provide it with a specific python interp

To those asking how this differs from virtualenv: it's meant to compliment it. When you setup a new virtualenv, you can provide it with a specific python interpreter to use (2.6, 2.7, 3.2, pypy, etc). Traditionally, you as a developer had to manually manage all of these base python installations in various places throughout your system, either from your distro's package manager or compiling from source. Pythonbrew automates this for you, making it dead simple to have several python variations living harmoniously on your system at the same time. From what I understand it plus virtualenv are now the equivalent to Ruby's rvm in features and ease-of-use (although you'll probably also want to grab virtualenvwrapper to make your life even easier). It also provides a quick, scriptable way to test your code against multiple versions of python, which is quite handy for library authors.