I'm planning to distribute PAPER as a zipapp where the bootstrap script does some initial unpacking to put wheels in a temporary directory, then delegates to the contained code (similar to how the standard library `ensurepip` works). The code that creates the zipapp is in the repository and I'm thinking of genericizing that and making it separately available, too.

Although several variations on this theme already exist, I'm sure. https://github.com/pex-tool/pex/ is arguably one of them, but it's quite a bit bulkier than what I'm looking for.