Real life use case
At a Java-heavy company we had a python project that needed to go into a Nexus artifact repository. Python doesn't really have binaries, so simply just wanted to .tar or .zip the python files and push. The repo already had maven integration, so we used <packaging>pom</packaging>
designator with the maven assembly plugin to package the python project as a .zip
and upload it.
The steps are outlined in this SO post