Making things easy for the developer is ActiveState's mission

ActiveState added enhancements to its ActiveState Platform, a SaaS offering, benefiting contributors, maintainers and users facing challenges with Python and other open source languages.

The new features will give ActiveState Platform account holders the flexibility to fork an existing language distribution and install it into a virtual environment. Developers eliminate wasted cycles and engineering teams increase velocity and productivity.

With forking functionality, developers have the flexibility to add or remove packages to an ActiveState language build or one built and shared with them through the Platform. Developers can tailor the build for specific needs, increase performance and decrease attack surface area.

Users also can access the most current package and language versions of ActivePython, ActivePerl and ActiveTcl, fork a copy as their own and be notified of updates. This enables standard and up-to-date builds.

The ActiveState Platform eliminates wasted cycles and provides certainty of reproducibility across teams. The new capabilities, currently in beta, are available to existing customers as part of their subscription. Account types range from Community (free) to Enterprise (custom pricing). The ability to add or remove packages in ActiveState’s vetted builds is first provided for ActivePython 3.6 Linux. An inventory of over 400 vetted Python packages is available.

The new functionality builds on ActiveState Platform’s existing capabilities including automatic builds for Python languages with automatic dependency resolution and integrated Python runtime vulnerability reporting.