[Doc-SIG] Re: [Python-Dev] Documentation packages
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake at acm.org
Wed Oct 1 16:24:15 EDT 2003
Dethe Elza writes:
> While Windows users may have trouble with *.bz2, and be unfamiliar
> enough with the extension *.tgz to not even try (even if it does work),
> I've never known a *nix box to have trouble with *.zip or known a unix
> user who had trouble with *.zip. So I'd suggest keeping the various
> flavors of documentation, but standardize on zip compression. That
> will at least remove one variable.
At this point, the bzip2 compression has been the most-requested (in
terms of emails begging us to add it); the most important aspect that
makes it desirable is that the file sizes are so much better. From
this perspective, ZIP files are the worst for the formats which cause
a lot of individual files to be packaged (most importantly, the HTML
and LaTeX source formats). There are still a lot of people who want
to pull the files over slow links that this seems valuable, at least
for those two formats. (It may be that it's *only* valuable for those
formats, and can be dropped for the PDF and PostScript formats.)
> I agree that the main point of all of this is to reduce confusion for
> the newbie coming to the site to download it. But 90% of those are
> going to be windows users, and the rest of us have gotten used to
> living in a windows-dominated world. Using bz2 may get you better
> compression and save bandwidth, but it wasn't standard the last time I
> installed RedHat or Debian. Zip has it's faults, but everybody is
> familiar with it.
Interesting; I don't recall the last time I had to build my own
bzip2. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything special to get it on
RedHat recently. The bandwidth savings aren't nearly so valuable to
python.org as they are to end users on metered internet connections;
those are the users who were so incredibly vocal that we actually
started posting those.
-Fred
--
Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation
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