I have attached a patch against CVS to expand the functionality of the tarball formats in the sdist and bdist commands. It adds the following: Adds bztar format to generate .tar.bz2 tarballs Uses the -f argument to overright old tarballs automatically, I am assuming that if the old tarball was wanted it would have been moved or else the version number would have been changed. Uses the -9 argument to bzip2 and gzip to use maximum compression. Compress uses the maximum compression by default. Tests for correct value for the 'compress' argument of make_tarball. This is one less place for someone adding new compression programs to forget to change. I have a patch (but not attached) which detects if tar is GNU tar > 1.13, but I do not know if I should submit it because it depends on the Unix-only popen2 module. Can it be assumed that only Unix users will generate tarballs, and if this assumption can be made should I submit the patch? In any case, I don't know very much about tar, so someone else would have to put the information to use after it is detected. -- Harry Henry Gebel, Senior Developer, Landon House SBS West Dover Hundred, Delaware "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen." Luke 24:5 (NRSV)