[Distutils] Deprecating little used file types/extensions on PyPI?

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 19, 2016, at 10:34 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 19 August 2016 at 15:27, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> This is an important consideration that nobody mentioned thus far— I have
>> not used Windows to release a project to PyPI.. ever. So We should
>> absolutely start by switching that to defaulting to .tar.gz.
> 
> I had forgotten this fact, but yes, zip is the standard for sdists on Windows.
> 
> I would suggest that we need to allow both .zip and .tar.gz for
> sdists. Specifically, how would we handle people building sdists for
> upload using Python 2.7 on Windows? Would we backport this change?

Not sure if we’ll be able to back port it to 2.7 itself, but it’s a trivial
change to make inside of setuptools as well. Here’s a PR to setuptools that
will adjust the default: https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/pull/748.

While I think it’s OK to allow .zip in the interim, I do think we should be
trying to move towards only allowing a single format. I honestly don’t care
what that format is, but I think it’ll be easier to move Windows users onto
.tar.gz than it will be to move everyone else to .tar.gz (smaller user base,
Python and setuptools are not “ingrained” into the System like is the case
on RHEL/CentOS so easier upgrades, etc).

My motivation on this is trying to normalize things across platforms and to
fix persistent sort of weirdness things that I see coming up over and over.
One such one is people getting different results (for whatever reason) when
a project has two sdists available. So I’ve been working on trying to make
that the case, and it would greatly simplify things if there were only one
filename acceptable for a single (Project, Version)’s sdist. I also think it
helps make other tooling around PyPI easier to write, and it helps ensure
that the dependencies to install something are minimal (though not particularly
relevant for zip/gztar since they both use zlib).

> 
> (It doesn't matter whether we say ".tar.gz is the standard, what do we
> do about Windows users?" or ".zip is the standard, what do we do about
> Unix users?" the problems are the same).
> 
> Paul


—
Donald Stufft