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I will make it more general since it does not really apply to BS anymore - see my last mail.
One thing that people probably don't like is that it's a completely non-standard workflow. Standard ways of modifying BeautifulSoup include: 1) fixing the upstream distribution, 2) subclassing & overiding behavior, or 3) creating a private fork. What exactly are you patching? The one patch that I found pointed to in the list archives
So regarding the patches, most of them are little modifications that are needed in order to use them locally from externals folder without the need to install them into the full system - because if there would have been installed there (e.g. by OS package management, or user interaction), there would be no need to install them. As mentioned already several times this was just the simplest and minimal intrusive solution I could think of - and should be easy to understand.
So 1) and 3) would be nice solutions but create too much workload for me to maintain. 2) is what I actually try to do - but it need some changes for some packages.
Bundling dependencies (ie httplib2 in externals) is pretty non-standard too. Why not declare the dependencies and let `pip install` resolve them at installation time. Dependency isolation and private non-system installs can be achieved using virtualenv or a similar tool.
Regarding pip - we are talking about compat which does not need to be installed - so pip and installation in general would be something completely new. Despite the fact that core has also a mode in which it can be used without installing as module. Regarding virtualenv - I am a newbee here - can you explain of what use it could be in this case?
That's how most other Python projects work. Is there a reason it won't work here?
In fact - I oriented myself at another python project too "VisTrails" but this might not have been the best decision. Was the first python code I found that was able to install it's own deps. But it did not need to patch some of them... ;)
Greetings and thanks!