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

[Brett Cannon]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 at 12:53 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> 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]
>

So I think you're both right, but at different time scales. :) I think
Donald is right that the short-term time scale of "now" by suggesting we
just go with tar.gz since it has the numbers. But I think Leonardo's point
of general alignment with zip for packaging overall is good for the
"formally define sdist" time scale and we potentially introduce an .sdist
file extension.

IOW I think we're all starting to talk in circles and since no one has
screamed "the sky is falling" against the proposal, it's probably time to
start formalizing a plan.
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