On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 11:43, Georg Brandl g.brandl@gmx.net wrote:
Am 05.12.2010 20:39, schrieb "Martin v. Löwis":
I wonder if it's still necessary to provide .tar.bz2 and .tgz source tarballs. If anything, it would be nice to provide .tar.xz in addition to .tar.bz2, which has a nicer compression ratio:
Looking at download statistics, for the 2.7 release, in July, we had these numbers of downloads:
Python-2.7.tgz 32059 Python-2.7.tar.bz2 24986 python-2.7.msi 577240
In November, the numbers were
Python-2.7.tgz 24535 Python-2.7.tar.bz2 20797 python-2.7.msi 569328
OK, so the tgz is still more popular than the bz2 one, and that means it shouldn't go away.
Well, is it more popular because that is just what people are used to downloading or the first download link on the web page? Or is it because people fundamentally prefer tgz files over tar.bz2? Are there actual platforms that can't handle tar.bz2 but can handle tgz? I'm willing to bet it's because of the download link order and has nothing to do with actual preference (especially since we don't state file size on the download page).
Personally I don't know why we have both tgz and tar.bz2 other than tradition. I say trim it down to tar.bz2 for portability and move on to using a ustar-based tar.xz to be cutting edge and minimize download size overall while making it the first download option to make sure people notice it. I'd also vote for listing the file size on the download page, but that's just another step for release managers that I don't want to burden them with.
-Brett
I've decided to make tar.xz tarballs available for the remaining 3.2 prereleases; we'll see if anyone at all is interested in them.
As for the .zip version, I've not found any requests for a source download with Windows-specific newlines. I suppose that developers either check out directly from SVN, or have decompression programs and editors that can cope.
cheers, Georg
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