We rarely think about it, but the growth of our Open Source communities is based on how easy it is to share and manage software modules/packages. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel each time you need a solution.

You also need those packages to be installable easily with the required level of control to manage complexity (dependency checking, build, revert/undo, upgrade, to only name a few).

Three modules/packages management tools that save our time everyday :

• For Linux systems, we have solutions such as apt-get for Debian packages.
• For daily working on source code within a team, Subversion (SVN) helps a lot. Fetching the code for the third party dependencies you need, alongside the core project’s code is possible with SVN’s external definitions.
• For Python development, we have a great tool. EasyInstall helps you add new third party modules to your Python installation, by automatically downloading, building, and installing them for you. You simply type at your command line : easy_install [a_module_name]