Don't you use a virtualenv? There are benefits beyond having up to date packages and its not especially complicated (I am guessing it would take an hour or two to learn).
Yes, I know about virtualenv. I also know it still requires either having pre-compiled wheels, or a compiler on the frontend. Same problem, a bit better isolated from system packages.
Is it so hard to do an 'apt-get install build-essential'? It seems a bit silly to stay on only system packages when a 'apt-get install mysql-dev && pip install pymysql' gets you a fresh up to date Python 3 (or 2) package in your virtualenv. Heck, if managing a bunch of virtualenvs is too much install virtualenv wrapper and just use 'mkvirtualenv yourproject'.
