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

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 19, 2016, at 2:00 PM, Leonardo Rochael Almeida <leorochael at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ure, more people will be affected this way than just the folks releasing on Windows, but given the shortcuts for setting the sdist format per project or per home directory that Donald mentioned, I think the collective effort in the migration will be smaller than the continuous effort of explaining to newcomers that the reason we use a .tar.gz based format for sdists versus a .zip based format for wheels is some historical accident, specially if we plan to change sdists back to .zip format in the future...


I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask me why people (generally) use .tar.gz for sdists and why wheels use zip, though I don’t do much beginner stuff. Do you have some sort of evidence or data to suggest that this is a problem that people are experiencing or are you theorizing that folks *might* get confused by this?

I think the effort changing non-Windows platform is going to be a lot more effort than changing Windows platform for a few reasons:

* There are less people releasing on Windows than on non-Windows, the more people you need to migrate to a new thing, the longer you can expect it to take.

* Windows does not come with Python, thus people are generally free to upgrade their Python or setuptools installation at all [1] meanwhile Python and setuptools tends to be a core part of non-Windows OSs where upgrading one or the other can “void the warranty” and cause breakage to the entire OS, combine this with things like CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS and we lengthen the time that people are using these older tools by years, maybe even a decade.

* More people are using .tar.gz than .zip, which means changing from .tar.gz is more likely to cause issues (under the assumption that any change can cause issue, and the more people who have some sort of change occur to them, the more likely an issue is to occur).

Oh, and TIL that anyone who has Python 3.4+ installed has a command line tool for extracting ``.tar.gz`` files [2]


[1] Yes, some people *might* not have administrator access on their box and be unable to do that, but whoever *is* responsible for those boxes can.

[2] https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/tarfile.html#command-line-interface <https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/tarfile.html#command-line-interface>

—
Donald Stufft



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