I developed a build system that is intended to make it easier to work
with virtualenv style development in python. More generally, I
intended it to be able to help build deployment packages with minimal
lib dependencies. For example, it is currently capable of building a
python project into a Debian package that depends only on the python
interpreter and libc.

I have released the code at [1]. This is only part of the code as the
project is managed as a set of git repositories by the repo tool (used
to develop android).

It is intended to allow the management of code for many different
projects in a single repo style repository. It also allows building of
individual python projects into virtualenvs, which then get rolled
into Debian packages to make deployment on a Debian-style system (e.g.
Debian or Ubuntu or Linux Mint) easier. The binary build targets
probably would work on other Linuxes and maybe even Mac OS X, but I
have not tried that at all.

I currently manage Debian systems, which is why only Debian packages
are the only type of OS package supported right now. If others are
interested, I'd love to see about extending to RPM or other formats
that might be useful.

If you want to get a quicker start, you can execute these commands:
$ curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/
repo
$ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
$ mkdir src_playground
$ cd src_playground
$ ~/bin/repo init -u git://github.com/digg/repo-manifest.git
$ ~/bin/repo sync
$ cd digg/dev/hackbuilder/bootstrap_build
$ ./build.sh clean && ./build.sh build
$ cd ../
$ ../../../bootstrap-build//digg/dev/hackbuilder/virtualenv/bin/hack
help

Also look at the HACK_BUILD files located throughout the source tree.
These files are similar in concept to makefiles. However, I'd like to
think that they are much simpler to read.

Admittedly, it could be simpler, but this project is pretty new, so I
am hoping to get some feedback early on how to round some of the rough
edges.

[1]https://github.com/digg/repo-digg-dev-hackbuilder