[Doc-SIG] Re: [Python-Dev] Planning to drop gzip compression for future releases.

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake at acm.org
Tue Sep 21 16:36:15 CEST 2004


[Responding to an absolutely enormous deluge of emails on python-dev...]

On Sunday 19 September 2004 10:06 pm, Anthony Baxter wrote:
 > I have no intention of dropping tar.gz source releases. I think Fred
 > was talking about the documentation tarballs. Even then, I think there's
 > some advantages to keeping both, and I don't really see the advantage
 > to dropping the tar.gz format. But hey, that's up to Fred - he's the
 > one who makes the doc releases.

Dang, it doesn't pay to be away from email for three days, does it?

Yes, I was only talking about documentation releases.  It never occurred to me 
anyone would think I was talking about Python source releases.  Maybe I 
shouldn't have added python-dev to the recipients list for my original email, 
but too often objections get heard quite late if I don't include python-dev.

For the documentation, there's a much longer history of providing the bz2 
versions of the archives.  There are also many more archives we can drop per 
release.

While in theory disk space isn't supposed to be an issue, it seems to be 
something our sysadmin group is dealing with on a regular basis (mostly 
cleaning up old webserver logs).  So while the space itself may not be an 
issue, it certainly generates tedious work for volunteers.

My motivation in dropping the bz2 archives is two-fold:

1.  Reduce disk space consumed per release, mostly to ease the burden on the 
sysadmin group.

2.  Reduce the number of files posted for the documentation per release, so 
that choices for end-users are easier to pick through.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>



More information about the Doc-SIG mailing list