alt Hacker NewsQuite interesting to observe PyPI being used as a distro agnostic binary package manager. Someone is going to create a NixOs competitor that uses PyPI for hosting and uv for installation.
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I realize you are tongue in cheek, but I hope people respect the logical limits of this sort of thing.
Years ago, there were some development tools coming out of the Ruby world – SASS for sure, and Vagrant if I remember correctly – whose standard method of installation was via a Ruby gem. Ruby on Rails was popular, and I am sure that for the initial users this had almost zero friction. But the tools began to be adopted by non-Ruby-devs, and it was frustrating. Many Ruby libraries had hardcoded file paths that didn’t jive with your distro’s conventions, and they assumed newer versions of Ruby than existed in your package repos. Since then I have seen the same issue crop up with PHP and server-side JavaScript software.
It’s less of a pain today because you can spin up a container or VM and install a whole language ecosystem there, letting it clobber whatever it wants to clobber. But it’s still nicer when everything respects the OS’s local conventions.
For those who like the idea but don't want to use someone else's bandwidth for it: the PyPI API is described across several PEPs and documented on-site (https://docs.pypi.org/api/); and a mirroring tool is implemented under PyPA stewardship (https://pypi.org/project/bandersnatch/).
But at the individual project level this definitely isn't new. Aside from the examples cited in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46561197, another fairly obvious example of a compiled binary hosted on PyPI is... uv.