[Distutils] sdist default archive format

[David Cournapeau]

Ben Finney wrote:
> Leonardo Santagada <santagada at gmail.com> writes:
>
>   
>> What about unix permissions are those supported on zip, and are they
>> important in a source package? I would think they are importante (and
>> not supported in zip) but I'm not sure.
>>     
>
> The classic one is the “execute” permission on files. It's very
> important to preserve that (whether on or off) in distribution of works
> for use on Unix; and the Zip format doesn't support it AFAIK.
>   

I think the problem of execute permission should be handled on its own
(where the format is part of the problem, of course). There are problems
with e.g. setuptools which do things differently than distutils with
respect to the execute permission on some platforms, and that causes
some distributions problems (like nose not finding tests at some
locations), not just for sdist command.

Whatever the solution, it should be as consistent as possible on every
platform.

cheers,

David