Installing Pyramid without the template systems (Mako and Chameleon)
There is a project to eventually remove those templating dependancies and make them available as separate packages. The work started at last year pycon sprints and can be continued this year, who knows. OTOH having those packages installed in your venv doesn't really affect your app so just avoid using them and only use the JSON renderer or any other renderers. Instead of forking Pyramid and removing those dependancies in setup.py I propose you to join us and work on the removal project so we can all benefit the same features.
Is there a "good way" to install Pyramid without the templating systems? The templating systems I speak of are Mako and Chameleon. In Single Page Applications (SPA) there is very little need for server-side templating since all of the templates are rendered on the client-side with javascript. I like the power of Pyramid but the template system is unnecessary baggage in some cases.
I have a feeling that the only way to accomplish this task is to fork Pyramid and modify the setup.py to remove these dependencies. That may break things,but then again, Pyramid is built in such a way that it may not care as long as nothing tries to call a renderer for one of these templates. Who knows?