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Fabric isn't normally deployed on target servers though - it connects to them through SSH.

That’s not what I meant: If you build your virtualenv on the target server, you need build tools like GCC or development files like libpq-dev. I prefer to have as few stuff on servers as possible.

Thanks - that does sound like a big advantage of the deb / rpm route. Plus you don't really want your app servers spending their CPU time compiling.

That’s a plus too. An “aptitude dist-upgrade” is really fast.

Yes, but unless rpm/deb works with softlinks, it is not atomic right? Do you do anything before/after dist-upgrade or is it included in the pre/post install script?

For example, for our deployment, we rely on softlinks and uwsgi robust reload behavior to avoid losing requests. I've seen many devops who were using hg update/git update as a way to "deploy" (arg!), but I'm not sure about the behavior of deb/rpm.

You can do whatever you want inside of the post-install hooks which are just shell scripts. Including any kind of soft link black magic. :)

And you’re right: replacing files of a running application can lead to all kind of weirdness. I’d even prefer to lose some requests than to risk that.

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