Of the many mentions of requirements.txt, this is the one that prompted me to figure this out. Thanks.

This post laid it out for me: http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2009/05/notes-using-pip-and-v...

He actually has a REQUIRES file that's in requirements.txt format, so it looks like he kind of does.

It's still not properly packaged up and also nowhere to be found on http://pypi.python.org resulting in no pip and no easy_install options. Pretty much every useful python package is distributed that way, see httpie for example [1].

[1] https://github.com/jkbr/httpie