Last night at the Atlanta Python Meetup, I became aware that there are folks who have been around Python for a while who are unaware of the Python Cheese Shop. The “Cheese Shop” (named after the Monty Python skit) is intended to be a central repository for libraries and applications written in Python. Couple this with easy_install and you have a quick, easy, and clean way to install libraries and applications to your Python installation. By issuing the single command `easy_install ipython`, you will have the latest IPython installed on your system.
I recall that the Cheese Shop had no cheese. Unfortunate choice of name for the central repository.
It is too bad that the Cheese Shop is currently down (6:47pm pacific).
The choice of name is a little tongue-in-cheek, of course. :) More personality than the previous name (pypi -- Python package index), IMO.
Another nice thing about the cheese shop is Cheesecake (http://pycheesecake.org/) -- similar to Perl's CPANTS (http://cpants.perl.org/), for rating a package's kwalitee.