Packaging and shipping a python library and scripts, the professional way

Question

I have the task of packaging and shipping a commercial application bundle, which will include:

1. a python library (developed by us)
2. some python programs dep

Answer 1

The proper way to do this (w/o shipping own Python) is to create Python Eggs, which then can be installed by Python package manager like easy_install or pip. The setup and install is performed by setup.py, which is just a Python script, so you can include all kinds of non-standard setup procedures if needed.

When using pip, it's easy to install eggs in virtualenv, which would make it isolated from user's Python installation (apart of the interpreter binary itself).