I'd love to see support for writing directly into distribution's package managers' databases added to things like pip, npm, gems, etc. too but I'm curious what playing nicely with automake gains here. I'm not too experienced with it, and I don't quite see where it would fit into that process.

I think of automake as being more part of the build process. But if things worked as you and inopinatus suggest, and you have taught something like pip 2.0 to bypass the rpm package manager and instead add records directly to the RPM database for a binary wheel package that pip has installed, aren't you kind of routing around any problems of a distribution's compatibility with a language's custom build process entirely?

Or did you mean to reply one level up? Though, again, I'm not sure where automake would help with converting one binary package format into a distribution-specific binary format.