Yeah, the lxc package gives you command line tools that are a close analogue to virtualenv. Combine it with a filesystem like btrfs for copy-on-write, and it's

Yeah, the lxc package gives you command line tools that are a close analogue to virtualenv. Combine it with a filesystem like btrfs for copy-on-write, and it's FAR quicker too. I'm glad you mentioned JNI. In Java, native is the exception. In python, it's much closer to the rule. A hell of a lot of python libraries rely on C components which leak out of a virtualenv. Building from source isn't reliable. It's quite hard, not to mention relatively slow. See the great success of RPM and APT based Linux distributions as proof of this.