Hi distutils, Today Facebook Open Sourced a competitor to PEX and other zip based distribution methods for Python (and potentially other languages). Basically it's claim to fame is start up time for large modules being similar to regular on file system modules due to extracting on read via SquashFS mounted executables. For more information read our blog post: - https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/xars-a-more-efficient-open-source-sy... https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/xars-a-more-efficient-open-source-sy... The bdist_xar 'wheel' like plugin is also now in PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/xar/ https://pypi.org/project/xar/ (https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/ https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/). Main reason I wanted to post here was I'd love to reach out to our OS maintainers on list (e.g. Mr Stinner) and talk about getting the components of XAR into the OS's package repos. The main components that make sense are: - xarexec_fuse: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/ https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/ - squashfuse: a newer version with squashfuse_ll (and optionally zstd support) https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse - squashfs-tools: a newer version with zstd support (made optional I guess) Once we had this, it would make building XARs as easy as building wheels, even more so when we can define OS level dependencies for it! Please feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions etc. - Also want to note, Sumanah suggested I floated this here, I apologize if this is a misuse of the list. If so, please ignore. I was torn wether or not this is appropriate. Thanks, Cooper