Daniel Himmelstein <daniel.himmelstein@gmail.com> added the comment:

we could consider an API addition

Just brainstorming here... perhaps an API addition would be most appropriate in the shutil module (https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/shutil.html) which already contains shutil.make_archive and shutil.unpack_archive. One could imagine shutil.compress and shutil.decompress that took a format argument to specify the compression type. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue32160> _______________________________________