> Well, you still need a tool to fetch the zip and you need another tool to unzip it

Windows 10 actually has everything necessary around, so I don't! That's kind of the beauty of it, the other point being that every dev knows how to deal with a .zip (more than know NuGet, i would assume)

> So are you just looking for an automated regular installer where the
end result shows up in the Installed Apps list, or a scriptable
build-tool package?

Actually I would explicitly NOT want it to show up in Installed Apps, or any other sort of advanced script. Sorry if I haven't been clear on that, I want to avoid any such side effects as much as possible.

What I want is the TARGET FOLDER result of running the regular windows installer. If you haven't noticed, this folder can be copied onto a system where it was never "installed" and with a simple .bat script (or powershell, ...) that sets %PATH% and %PYTHONPATH% you can use it in-place with no further install required.

That's why I'm asking for this, there doesn't seem to be even any need to install Python, and since for an automated build I want to minimize side effects, why would I want anything more than a .zip in that case? I can only see downsides