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The setup.py approach that loosely couple dependencies is definitely useful as the author describes.

However I think important advice to library developers that's missing in the article is to be explicit (somewhere, likely in documentation) about the version/source of each dependency that the library has been tested against.

Libraries are distributed, applications are deployed.

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Sure that'd be good too :) This wasn't really aiming to be a comprehensive best practices guide to distributing things. Mostly trying to explain the differences between what a dependency in setup.py means vs a requirements.txt like file.

I have a hard time coming up with wording because sometimes applications are distributed as well and the "deployment" is just a config file + installing the dependencies. I hate using the term application because of that confusion but I haven't thought of a better way to word it yet :(

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