[Distutils] PEP 527 - Removing Un(der)used file types/extensions on PyPI

[Reinout van Rees]

Op 24-08-16 om 09:06 schreef Nick Coghlan:
> I think in this case, campaigning to remove ".zip" support will prove
> to be a false economy, as anything you'd gain from simplifying the
> toolchain implementation you'll lose arguing with folks that would
> prefer for .zip to be the default instead of .tar.gz.

While it might sound very strange: at one time (2008) it helped us that 
**both** .zip and .tar.gz were allowed

There was a bug in python 2.4's build-in tarfile module that failed to 
extract files with a path that was exactly 100 characters long. 99 fine, 
101 fine, 100 would fail to be extracted.

See http://maurits.vanrees.org/weblog/archive/2008/09/scrambled-eggs

In order to support broken 2.4 pythons, zest.releaser explicitly created 
.zips for a long time :-) If I look at the changelog, the issue still 
cropped up from time to time in 2012, four years later.

We stopped forcing .zip in version 3.56 (2015-03-18).


So...

a) It came in handy to have both .zip and .tar.gz once :-)

b) zest.releaser might have **massively inflated the number** of zip 
files in the statistics. zest.releaser is used a lot in the zope/plone 
corner of pypi and that's a very active corner of pypi. Donald, perhaps 
you could look at the top 10 of zip packages to see if it has a plone smell?



Reinout

-- 
Reinout van Rees                          http://reinout.vanrees.org/
reinout at vanrees.org                   http://www.nelen-schuurmans.nl/
"Learning history by destroying artifacts is a time-honored atrocity"