Unfortunately, that'd mean a package manager for C, Fortran, etc. as well, since so many Python packages have non-Python dependencies.

I've started using Docker for ensuring prod behaves the same as dev. Going from Mac dev to Linux prod would otherwise cause trouble.

I've heard people recommend poetry on here as something that is good for package management, but I haven't tried it. Does anyone know of something like that, but also can build your application into a Docker container as well?

It's not great, but also it isn't terrible, the problem with Python packaging is that there were many ways to do it and people are confused. What's worse, there are tons of articles (in including from PyPA) that are providing bad information.

If you use setuptools and place all your configuration declaratively in setup.cfg it is not that bad.

You might like portage. We have USE flags (which are ./configure --stuff), slots (so you can install multiple versions in a clean way), and any kind of dependency tree you can think of. When I am thinking of upgrading the system python, I can enable the next version and let things simmer for testing (building for py3.7 and 3.8 for example) before I actually throw the switch (eselect python set N).

While not official, doesn't conda solve this problem? (Except for not containing the latest versions).