First of all I’m afraid the point about Apache & MySQL is misleading and I’ll have to clarify it: We don’t use neither for internal projects. It’s all PostgreSQ

First of all I’m afraid the point about Apache & MySQL is misleading and I’ll have to clarify it: We don’t use neither for internal projects. It’s all PostgreSQL. :) They’re both for our customers as we sell traditional web hosting with a LAMP stack (and yes, we have to compile PHP ourselves too, so we can offer different flavors). I never said you _have_ to compile everything yourself. In case of Python I said you shouldn’t inflict the pain of programming Python 2.4 just because you’re on RHEL/CentOS 5 or earlier. System packages have several problems I outlined too. Most important: you add a middleman to the release pipeline, no virtualenv and possible dependency conflicts: I have apps that depend both SQLAlchemy 0.6 and 0.7 – they couldn’t run on the same server. But OTOH we use stock packages as far as possible, because it’s less work. Eg. there’s no reason to compile an own Python on Oneiric and later. Same goes for PostgreSQL which is uptodate. It’s all about freeing yourself from constrains in points that matter, not adopting a new religion.