I'm still working on it, but sadly I'm not a packaging person so progress has been nearly zero :(
From how I interpreted it, he meant you could create a new python package, this would effectively be the binary you need.
In your current package, you could depend on the new one, and through that - pull in the binary.
This would let you easily decouple your package from the binary,too - so it'd be easy to update the binary to latest even without pushing a new version of your original package
I've maintained release pipelines before and handled packaging in a previous job, but I'm not particularly into the python ecosystem, so take this with a grain of salt: an approach would be
Pip Packages :
* Unsloth: current package, prefers using unsloth-llama, and uses path llama-cpp as fallback (with error msg as final fallback if neither exist, promoting install for unsloth-llama)
* Unsloth-llama: new package which only bundles the llama cpp binaryI was trying to see if I could pre-compile some llama.cpp binaries then save them as a zip file (I'm a noob sorry) - but I definitely need to investigate further on how to do python pip binaries
But I think similarly for uv we need a setup.py for packaging binaries (more complex)
Try to find prebuilt and download.
See if you can compile from source if a compiler is installed.
If no compiler: prompt to install via sudo apt and explaining why, also give option to abort and have the user install a compiler themselves.
This isn't perfect, but limits the cases where prompting is necessary.