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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 August 2016 at 02:33, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 at 12:53 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 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.

I think tarballs are a better long term release archiving format at
any time scale - they just assume you're going to untar them before
trying to do anything useful with them, which is a reasonable workflow
requirement to impose for sdists. While relatively few people actually
need to work directly with tarballs in that context, that's just
because they've faded into the background of various build systems
that produce some other format (e.g. RPMs, deb archives, Docker
container layers).

By contrast, for Python's built formats like wheel and egg, it's
useful to be able to easily access their contents *without* unpacking
them first, so it makes sense to go with the format that's friendlier
to that model (i.e. zip).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia