I see. My assumption was you had a problem with a certain application, and my reply was from that viewpoint.

I 100% agree that Python programs relying on binary programs can be really complicated. In fact one of my projects requires a third party binary program to be installed, but I do not build it from source and just require it to be available on the system. And I encountered lot of issues when trying to create AppImage and sharing in certain environments. Actually this made me learn Rust, so I have a real compiled language in my repertoire for future projects when needed.

Why do you need gcc to compile a Python program? Which project do you talk about? In such cases its probably the best to run the application in a virtual machine. To me sounds like either a neglected project or designed to run in a docker image maybe? When was it updated last?