Python's greatest weakness is its packaging and distribution, and this project makes no effort to make it simple.
brew install magic-wormhole [1]
And that covers 90% of the people that care. Granted I think you're right that software packaging and distribution is still generally broken in 2017, but that's a problem across the board. It's a problem with java, node.js, python, etc.
Disagree. I don't know a single non-programmer with brew installed on their Mac, and non-programmers make up 90% of the people who have the most trouble copying files between two computers.
I'm not even sure I see how this is much easier than ssh if you know the basics.
You probably shouldn't have tried to pad out your steps by taking a detour into package management.
I'm hoping to get beyond that, once I get the protocol and feature set stabilized. Using something like PyInstaller or py2app to get a single-file executable will be the first step. Porting it to other languages (I've started on SPAKE2 in Rust) might help too.
FWIW, "apt install magic-wormhole" now works on Debian (stretch) and Ubuntu (zesty). Also homebrew, as mentioned before.
Quick survey: what packaged form would be most useful to you (for desktop usage.. having some kind of iOS/Android app is a whole other beast). PPA? .dmg? .exe? .msi?
Specifically, one that 'just works' on windows, and doesn't require that you open powershell and need to change into an obscure directory to use it, or have the binary sit in a folder full of DLLs to run.
In fact, ideally one you don't have to even type anything in; for example, if you can just say; grab this one file from some safe known url (eg. github), and rename it from 'magic.exe' to 'zesty-fruit-324234.exe' and run it.
It's been bundled with Python for years now, and even if you don't have it, it's easy to get:
In production when I deploy a django app, now I might have two libraries in different places in my system. One from the OS, and one from the pip dependency.