1. How should I be using pip from setup.py? I already have some development/deployment scripts that check out a branch and run setup.py to gather dependencies, and have since changed over from using install_requires to a Popen to pip (largely due to setuptools mangling django-registration), but this feels hack-y.

2. One thing that was nice about setuptools was the ability to use a local mirror without specifying a version number in the install_requires; this allowed us to update a package by just pulling down the latest tarball to the mirror. Does pip have a mechanism for this, or do I need to explicitly update requirements.txt to point to the new tarball?

I’d still like there to be a way to ship requirements to PyPI somehow. While maintaining a list on a URL (especially in SVN) is not a bad burden, but it does make everybody rely on your server being up, and the server of any package listings you depend on, and what they depend on, etc.

I’d rather have that responsibility reside in a centrally maintained, backup-able and fallback-able system like PyPI, instead of having to worry about potentially quite a few sites that can go down. (that easy_install and I believe pip as well hunt links off PyPI to find tarballs is understandable but not helpful here either, but that’s another topic)