[Distutils] Immutable Files on PyPI

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2014-10-01 00:41:38 +1000 (+1000), Nick Coghlan wrote:
[...]
> Which distro packagers? For Fedora, even if we pull from an
> upstream source control system, we'll still wrap it as a tarball
> inside an SRPM in order to feed it into the buld system.
[...]

Precisely that. Also lot of Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, et cetera
packagers are following that same pattern. Even when there is an
upstream release tarball available, many prefer to create one from
the VCS themselves and use that as the basis for their packaging.

What I've seen suggests the increase in (not necessarily
Python-based) projects who don't bother to create tarballs and
simply "release" from their version control systems has resulted in
a proliferation of distro packager countermeasures/immune responses.
They're beginning to rely on tools which automate dealing with the
fact that there may be no initial tarball (Debian's git-buildpackage
for example), and in the end it becomes easier for them to just
assume there is never an initial tarball and always create their own
anyway. So while their packaging formats use tarballs internally, a
lot of them are no longer using *upstream-provided* tarballs in
source packages and the existence of tarballs in their source
packages has instead become a mere implementation detail.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley