Theres a great programme called checkinstall that gets you 90% there. Rather than running 'make install' run 'checkinstall', or rather than 'sudo python installscript.pt', run 'sudo checkinstall python installscript.py'
It's also guilty of being unattractive to the developers I'd love to see use it. The site says "Recent News: Dec 26th, 2009" and then concentrates on a NOTE TO SLACKWARE 8.0 USERS.
Showing the hello world of checkinstall would be much better imho, and it's what developers from the web world expect.
Checkinstall of Python and VirtualEnv is the only sane way I've found to do python development and deployment when you're developing on Maverick and deploying to Lenny.
