What are the Python equivalents to Ruby’s bundler / Perl’s carton?

From what i’ve read about bundler — pip without virtualenv should work just fine for you. You can think of it as something between regular gem command and bundler. Common things that you can do with pip:

1. Installing packages (gem install)

   pip install mypackage
   

2. Dependencies and bulk-install (gemfile)

   Probably the easiest way is to use pip’s requirements.txt files. Basically it’s just a plain list of required packages with possible version constraints. It might look something like:

   nose==1.1.2
   django<1.3
   PIL
   

   Later when you’d want to install those dependencies you would do:

   $ pip install -r requirements.txt
   

   A simple way to see all your current packages in requirements-file syntax is to do:

   $ pip freeze
   

   You can read more about it here.

3. Execution (bundler exec)

   All python packages that come with executable files are usually directly available after install (unless you have custom setup or it’s a special package). For example:

   $ pip install gunicorn
   $ gunicorn -h 
   

4. Package gems for install from cache (bundler package)

   There is pip bundle and pip zip/unzip. But i’m not sure if many people use it.

p.s. If you do care about environment isolation you can also use virtualenv together with pip (they are close friends and work perfectly together). By default pip installs packages system-wide which might require admin rights.