worked around weird ordering issues by writing a shell script to install the requirements.txt line by line

jenkins.sh

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+if [ -n "${VAR:-x}" ]; then
+  WORKSPACE=.
+fi
+
+echo $WORKSPACE
+PYENV_HOME=$WORKSPACE/.pyenv/
+
+  
+# Delete previously built virtualenv
+if [ -d $PYENV_HOME ]; then
+    rm -rf $PYENV_HOME
+fi
+
+# Create virtualenv and install necessary packages
+virtualenv --no-site-packages $PYENV_HOME
+. $PYENV_HOME/bin/activate
+ordered_pip.sh $WORKSPACE/requirements.txt
+ordered_pip.sh $WORKSPACE/requirements_dev.txt
+cp /mnt/jenkins_backup/host_settings.py ./
+nosetests

ordered_pip.sh

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+#!/bin/sh
+
+echo $hash
+while read line
+do     
+    if [[ $line != \#* ]] ; then
+        #echo $line
+        pip install $line
+    fi
+done < $1
+echo "Final line count is: $a";

requirements.txt

@@ -1,15 +1,25 @@
-Cython==0.15.1
-ipython==0.12
-matplotlib==1.1.0
-numexpr==2.0.1
-numpy==1.6.1
-pandas==0.7.0rc1
-pymongo==2.1.1
-python-dateutil==1.5
+#date manipulation
 pytz==2011n
-pyzmq==2.1.11
-scikits.statsmodels==0.3.1
+python-dateutil==1.5
+
+#data source related
+pymongo==2.1.1
+
+#core scientific python
+numpy==1.6.1
 scipy==0.10.0
+http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib/files/matplotlib/matplotlib-1.1.0/matplotlib-1.1.0.tar.gz
+numexpr==2.0.1
+Cython==0.15.1
 tables==2.3.1
-tornado==2.2
-wsgiref==0.1.2
+scikits.statsmodels==0.3.1
+pandas==0.7.0rc1
+
+#zeromq related
+pyzmq==2.1.11
+
+
+
+
+
+

requirements_dev.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+# For debugger
+fancycompleter==0.2
+pyrepl==0.8.2
+Pygments==1.4
+pdbpp==0.7.2
+
+ipython==0.12
+
+# For unit tests
+nose==1.1.2
+unittest2==0.5.1
+requests==0.10.1

test_requirements.txt

@@ -1,14 +0,0 @@
-Cython==0.15.1
-ipython==0.12
-numpy==1.6.1
-numexpr==2.0.1
-pandas==0.7.0rc1
-pymongo==2.1.1
-python-dateutil==1.5
-pytz==2011n
-pyzmq==2.1.11
-scikits.statsmodels==0.3.1
-scipy==0.10.0
-tables==2.3.1
-tornado==2.2
-wsgiref==0.1.2