[Distutils] sdist default archive format

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Jun 18, 2009, at 17:18 PM, David Lyon wrote:

> But setup tools looks like it is trying to do the "right" thing and  
> getting it wrong...

It isn't so easy for setuptools to know which things ought to have +x  
and which things ought not just based on their pathnames or other  
metadata.  There was a bug in setuptools on cygwin years ago where  
something didn't have +x that needed it, and that was fixed in  
setuptools-0.6c6 by adding +x to a variety of files.  That led to  
this new bug where something has +x that shouldn't:

http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue6

I can imagine that in general there might be a package which has two  
files named "foo/bar" and "foo/quux" where the package really needs  
bar to have +x and quux not to have +x.

Having an archive format that preserves such bits would probably be a  
good way to solve all such problems -- by making it the packagers  
problems to set the bits before packaging rather than setuptools's  
problem to figure out which bits ought to be set after installation.

> 10% difference in library size is nothing.

1.8 / 2.5 == 72%, so 28% of the .zip file size is saved by switching  
to .tar.xz.  Of course, some packages may gain more or less than 28%  
(compared to ZIP compression) from LZMA compression.

Regards,

Zooko