Anybody using PEX in the wild have some tips on how they handle metadata relevant for distributions? I'm talking exposing versions, signatures, etc to tooling. I assume you might just embed it in some kinda format that supports that like a distro package or a container, but maybe there are ways to embed that in PEX since it's just a zip file?

Might be the "wrong" direction for you but we have Python scripts that script Pants workflows; and they do things like

pants publish --publish-output=artifacts.json ....

. That metadata we then publish to other sources, primarily our internal builds database which other tools pull from.

yeah that sounds about right... so it's just a home grown solution

You have control if you use science to build your scie (scie-pants does). See `science lift --app-info... build`: https://science.scie.app/cli.html#science-lift And the scie-pants example here: https://github.com/pantsbuild/scie-pants/blob/622df25b71c054fc0a7c58613d596e7e02bfcb88/package/scie-pants.toml#L6 And you can view this in action via

SCIE=inspect pants | jq .science

for the latest scie-pants version.

Awesome! Is

SCIE=inspect $scie

any different from

tail -1 $scie

?

No, except that inspect always works and the tail trick only works if the scie was built with --single-lift-line.