Around a decade ago I worked for a place that packaged and shipped python applications to windows desktops using a similar bundling tool, py2exe. It worked pret

Around a decade ago I worked for a place that packaged and shipped python applications to windows desktops using a similar bundling tool, py2exe. It worked pretty fine. Pretty much just unzips into a directory: there's your self contained python app hiding inside an exe and some associated data files/dlls in the directory. We still used wheel archives etc for managing some python dependencies during our dev and build process, but it was never a complete solution: some python packages depend upon non python shared libraries so you need to install them using an operating system level package manager. Then when shipping the software to users you cannot assume the user has a working version of python, or even if they do you don't want to increase your support burden by having your application running inside some arbitrary python environment.