I'm in the midst of writing our build/deployment scripts for a small Python application that will be run multiple times per day using a scheduled task. I figure now is as good a time as ever to investigate Python's setup.py feature.
My question is, is there any sort of benefit to investing the time in creating a setup.py file for internal business applications as opposed to say, writing a simple script that will activate my virtualenv, then download my pip packages based on my requirements file?
setup.py is intended for people who are writing their own Python code and need to deploy it.  If you either haven't written any Python code, or for some reason do not need to deploy any of the code you have written (you're not doing development in production, are you?), setup.py is not going to be terribly useful.
Is Python's setup.py beneficial for internal applications?