If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I use RVM (Ruby Version Manager) to manage gemsets on my computer. This way, I can have an app running on Rails 3.0 and another on Rails 3.1 and don’t have to worry about gem incompatibilities. Without RVM, you are stuck with just one set of gems for your entire system, which makes working on more than one app a hassle or worse. Naturally, this problem is not Ruby-specific, but affects every language that utilizes packages.
Python is one of them, and it’s one you’re likely to need to use at some point. The Python community (specifically these fine people) has developed a tool to manage your environments in Python in a very similar manner to how RVM makes our lives easier in Ruby. It’s called virtualenv.