On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 22:24, Steve Holden steve@holdenweb.com wrote:
On 12/5/2010 10:11 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:
On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 13:06, "Martin v. Löwis" martin@v.loewis.de wrote:
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?
These questions are difficult to answer with the download stats alone. If you really want to know, we should setup a poll...
I could if people care, but I don't anyone does.
Are there actual platforms that can't handle tar.bz2 but can handle tgz?
That, in turn, is easy to answer: yes, there are. Certain Solaris releases had gzip available (even though /usr/bin/tar wouldn't know how to invoke it), but no bzip2 utility.
If these are Solaris platforms we support then that's fine and we should keep tgz files, but if these are platforms we no longer care about then I say the lives of release managers should be simplified by cutting tgz files.
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).
Not sure what page you are looking at; on
http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/
we do.
I was actually looking at that page, but the size specifics are below the download links and are only noticeable if you scroll far enough down. I doubt I am the only person who has made that mistake.
-Brett
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.
You would also need to specify what page you refer to as "the download page".
Surely this is all bike shedding.
I don't think so when we are trying to make getting a new release easier w.r.t. smaller source download.
Will anyone fail to download Python because we don't offer a .xz foramt download? I sincerely doubt it.
I do as well.
So what do we gain by such an addition to compensate for the increasing complexity to be faced during releases?
It only increases complexity if we don't cut one of the tar.bz2 or tgz source releases. But by offering a a tar.xz file we can give people a smaller download which saves everyone time and bandwidth which can matter if the downloader's Internet connection is slow and/or costly.
-Brett
regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 PyCon 2011 Atlanta March 9-17 http://us.pycon.org/ See Python Video! http://python.mirocommunity.org/ Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/