>wouldnt it make sense to install only the minimum necessary to run
>roundup in a standardized way and to let all the other fancy stuff as an
>exercise for the individual distribution's package maintainer ?

No distribution is packaging roundup. Debian gave up on it a number of
years ago. There is one appliance for roundup, but that's the only
non-pip based deployment mechanism I know of.

One of the big issues with packaging roundup is how customizable the
tracker is. You can't just blindly upgrade. Version to version
upgrades are usually not that bad, but I have one person who is
jumping from 1.3 something to 2.1 who is having a hard time of it.

>when i install as superuser using "pip install roundup" or "setup.py
>install" (which in my opinion nobody should do at all) - everything goes
>into /usr/local

Not necessarily depends on the distribution, /usr/lib/pythonxx/site-packages is also 
possible.

In my (admittedly small sample) 80% of the installs are using
setup.py in a VM spun up to support roundup. The initial complaint
that the man pages, templates and locales were buried came from just
such an install.

Also we have a docker install as well where the man command etc. should
just work.

Distutils used to install manpages, etc. in the normal system
places. Changing to setuptools changed that. Setuptools only supports
creating executables wrappers in a place on the path. It has no
support for man, locale or other files. That has to be done in the
setup.py installer.

>but these aspects again should be covered with correctly
>working setuptools et al (correctly patched by the gentoo devs so that
>these files end up being installed in the correct place and are
>accessible by "man") ...

Setuptools provides no such mechanism and will not.  I have lost the
link to the multi year old ticket/forum multi where this issue was
discussed and fixes were proposed but there was no consensus by
developers on fixing this.

>maybe take a look at how django handles it - as i think it is
>comaparable in terms of setup.py needs.
>
>at least it installs one script 'django-admin' and a man page for it:
>
>	https://github.com/django/django

From the setup file, it looks like the man page is just buried on the
system somewhere. I don't see any indication that django's setup.py is
following the documented steps to override man page placement under
the python install directory.

Sadly Os X on mac's put things in really odd places.

The install directory is:

   /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages

and the man directory is /usr/share/man/. So regardless of what
solution happens here won't work in all cases.