Best practices/popular methods for distributing a program with a plugin?

their rules specifically say

Externally loading code from documented services is permitted.

however all the related examples are about javascript or wordpress plugins.

Management services that interact with and push software down to a site are permitted, provided the service handles the interaction on it’s own domain and not within the WordPress dashboard.

which doesn’t apply since I’m not providing a remote service but a local service. (unless an http download counts as a “management service”)

I emailed [email protected] and got an official response.

You cannot include the binary, nor can you one-click to install.