The high level ask here is to provide a setting configuration option to provide additional paths to search when resolving system Pythons.

On Enterprise Linux systems, it's common for additional packages to support products to be installed on non-system paths (such as /opt/). To use a public example, on CentOS 7 (and other RHEL7 derivatives) the Software Collections List (CentOS, RHEL) provides a build of Python 3.8 (RPM: rh-python38) that has an interpreter path of /opt/rh/rh-python38/root/bin/python among its supporting files.

uv can be packaged and installed as an RPM with supporting config for the environment (such as internal PyPI mirrors or python-preference = "only-system") at /etc/uv/uv.toml, however there are no provisions to provide additional paths to discover "system" Python installations. To enable interpreter auto-discovery without overriding PATH for an environment, a shim can be used (to replace uv and uvx):

#!/bin/sh
# uv shim script

# Add known internal Python versions to PATH if they exist
[ -d /opt/company/python311/bin ] && export PATH="/opt/company/python311/bin:${PATH}"
[ -d /opt/company/python39/bin ] && export PATH="/opt/company/python39/bin:${PATH}"
[ -d /opt/rh/rh-python38/root/bin ] && export PATH="/opt/rh/rh-python38/root/bin:${PATH}"

# Determine the actual binary to execute based on the name this script was called with
if [ "$(basename "$0")" = "uvx" ]; then
	exec /usr/lib/company-uv/bin/uvx "$@"
else
	exec /usr/lib/company-uv/bin/uv "$@"
fi

Rather than shim, and to avoid PATH overrides for autodiscovery, it would be nice to be able to provide additional (or override) paths when resolving available system Python installations.