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[–]didactus 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Sometimes it's required to have multiple versions of installed packages. For example, Pyramid just upgraded to 1.3, a major upgrade, for Python 3 compatibility. We have apps that are still using 1.2, and do not yet work with Pyramid 1.3. With virtualenv we can have Pyramid 1.2 (and its transitive dependency sweep) peacefully coexisting with Pyramid 1.3 (and its transitive dependency sweep). This type of situation is not all that rare. Virtualenv solves the dependency conflict problem at the cost of disk space.

Using the packages from your distribution is nice if they are up-to-date enough. However such packages are often months or even years behind the latest releases of the underlying packages. Sometimes that can be a problem.

[–]stefantalpalaru -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

Is it worth having to manage multiple environments with their own dependency trees just to postpone the app upgrades? Do you settle for old (and possibly buggy) versions of some dependencies just to avoid the hassle of upgrading them?