Hi, I'm looking for a good way to package a Python application that is going to be deployed on a Debian server.

The application itself depends on some modules which are not included in base Debian repository, although they might be in the future. This creates some problems... I depend on some patches to those modules. If the original module gets installed one day, the application will break. However if I install everything I need in a virtualenv just for that application, I lose the ability to upgrade Python itself (in case of security updates).

The third option would be to rename my fork of the upstream module and just treat it as a completely separate one. But that would mean changing the code (not much work, but it wouldn't be that clean / universal anymore).

Are there any other options that I missed? Are there any pros / cons I didn't see in the solutions above?