This step could be skipped if you built different debs for different distro versions (in chroots for example, like sbuild does it).
Might be too much of a hassle, though, for a little gain. It just looks slightly wrong to me that you first install a deb and then go and overwrite many of the files the deb installed.
I believe the reason is that the position of the virtualenv changes (from /home/buildbot/package-version/vrmd/venv to /vrmd/package/venv) and some links didn't match. I'm not 100% sure though, it's some time ago. :)
When he writes about this sort of thing Derren Brown (British mentalist) mentions that once you get to a decent level of skill with this you can just make up new rooms in your head; he talks about "dropping" overused rooms and starting fresh ones.
As one of the comments on the page says: "Well, it's a nice new picture but we've known its size, speed and origin for a very long time. Definitely not news."
> virtualenv /vrmd/$APP_NAME/venv
This step could be skipped if you built different debs for different distro versions (in chroots for example, like sbuild does it).
Might be too much of a hassle, though, for a little gain. It just looks slightly wrong to me that you first install a deb and then go and overwrite many of the files the deb installed.