Hi Marc-Andre,
yes pyrun is sort of what I had in mind :) That would be like the jre part of the jdk if you're familiar with java.
Ideally users will download the jre and use for running applications (eg. pyrun) but if there's a need for an extension build one need to have a compiler.. now given the plethora of linux distros that's a logistic nightmare.
So my little project does that (following the linux from scratch guidelines): it builds the toolchain (minus libc) the compiler and the python interpreter in one giant (at the moment) tarball. It should be easy to extract from it the runtime part (eg. the pyrun equivalent or the miniconda).
I hope this makes a bit more sense.