I've used fpm to make rpm and deb packages that simply include a virtualenv, it works ok. One of the significant tradeoffs to this approach is you lose the car

I've used fpm to make rpm and deb packages that simply include a virtualenv, it works ok. One of the significant tradeoffs to this approach is you lose the carefully-crafted tree-of-dependencies that the distros favor, so it makes the package pretty much automatically unacceptable to package maintainers. However, being able to have install instructions that amount to "yum/apt-get install <package>" is pretty great. I am hoping for an app/container convergence at some point, but we might need to drop the fine-grained dependency dream and have them be more self-contained, like Mac OS X apps.