[Distutils] PEP 517: Open questions around artifact export directories

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> Then shouldn't we be pushing for .tar.xz instead? (The Rust community is
> actually moving to .tar.xz for distributing Rust itself:
> https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rustup-1-4-0-released/11268 ; I don't know
> what their plans are for crates)

There's no xz support in the 2.7 stdlib, so I think that's a non-starter.

>> But mostly it’s just that most sdists are .tar.gz, and most Pythons except
>> older ones on Windows default to producing .tar.gz.
>
>
> Well, I've been actively overriding that default and uploading only .zip
> files since it's so much easier to work with zip files on Windows and UNIX
> than tar.gz which are only easy on UNIX. :) And it is rather ironic that
> historically projects lack a Windows wheel and thus need the sdist and yet
> it's typically in a format that's the most painful to work with on Windows.

FWIW I've been doing this for years too :-) [1]. But I don't care that
much myself either way.

I can see some benefit to standardizing on a single format instead of
making every backend author learn e.g. the weird quirks required to
get unicode filenames correct in two different formats, and I'm not
sure why it would be a big deal to change the default for new tools
going forward given that all our infrastructure does support .zip
already.

-n

[1] e.g. https://pypi.org/project/patsy/0.1.0/#files

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org