Oh my. I'm not sure that I'd use Python to make a point about easy interop with distro package managers. It quickly descends into a nightmarish hellscape if you have more than a few dependencies or, different versions of python, or god forbid: C extensions.

bdist_rpm isn’t equivalent to the Dockerfile above. It can be made reproducible with a few changes (locking the upstream image to a hash, locking the apt package version), but that’s likely overkill. Because when it breaks you’re not in for a “world of pain” at all, you just have a failing CI for an hour.

I take it from the lack of an answer to the question that the equivalent non-docker packaging would be much more complex.