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

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 25.08.2016 18:03, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 17:46:03 +0200
> "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> 
>> +sources of truth for a single version. Having multiple sdists often
>> times can
>> +account for strange bugs that only expose themselves based on which
>> sdist that
>> +the person used.
>>
>> You may not be aware, but developers that work on both Windows
>> and Unix often have two sets of source code packages: one using
>> Windows line ends, the other using Unix ones.
> 
> "often"? According to which sources? :-)

I should have written: "sometimes" :-) It's not very common for
Python packages. It was rather common for cross platform open source
applications before everyone switched to pointing folks to github
for source downloads some years ago.

I suppose the main reason to ship different archives on PyPI is to
address different tooling needs when manually downloading source
archives to e.g. have a look inside for some code review before
starting to use a package.

Aside: If pip is considered the only user of PyPI, I do wonder,
why we bother having a user readable download index at all ;-)

> I do work on both Windows and Unix (though Linux is my primary
> development platform), and I've never had a separate source code
> package for Windows (with differing files, line endings or whatnot).
> 
> I also agree that having multiple sdists for a single release is a
> recipe for weird issues.

It can be an issue, but mostly due to permission problems you can
find with .tar.gz files which do not happen with ZIP files.

OTOH, .tar.gz files do handle symlinks well, which ZIP files
often don't (or at least not per default).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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