A simple Python deployment problem - a whole world of pain
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We have several Python 2.6 applications running on Linux. Some of them are Pylons web applications, others are simply long-running processes that we run from the command line using nohup. We're also using virtualenv, both in development and in production. What is the best way to deploy these applications to a production server?
In development we simply get the source tree into any directory, set up a virtualenv and run - easy enough. We could do the same in production and perhaps that really is the most practical solution, but it just feels a bit wrong to run svn update in production. We've also tried fab, but it just never works first time. For every application something else goes wrong. It strikes me that the whole process is just too hard, given that what we're trying to achieve is fundamentally very simple. Here's what we want from a deployment process.

We should be able to run one simple command to deploy an updated version of an application. (If the initial deployment involves a bit of extra complexity that's fine.)
When we run this command it should copy certain files, either out of a Subversion repository or out of a local working copy, to a specified "environment" on the server, which probably means a different virtualenv. We have both staging and production version of the applications on the same server, so they need to somehow be kept separate. If it installs into site-packages, that's fine too, as long as it works.
We have some configuration files on the server that should be preserved (ie. not overwritten or deleted by the deployment process).
Some of these applications import modules from other applications, so they need to be able to reference each other as packages somehow. This is the part we've had the most trouble with! I don't care whether it works via relative imports, site-packages or whatever, as long as it works reliably in both development and production.
Ideally the deployment process should automatically install external packages that our applications depend on (eg. psycopg2).

That's really it! How hard can it be?