Oho. I don't like make that much ;-). Actually, I think I almost hate it :). The thing is that the tarballs are downloaded by pip which is removed by calling clean so I could not find any good ordering of the targets. Parsing requirements is not possible imo since it no longer contains filenames. My thinking was it gets the job done for now and it will be removed in the future anyway. BTW: I think it is less "yikes" than installing pip&company twice each time env is created :-P.