[Python-Dev] Enhancing the shutil module

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 8:55 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 11:51, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> For 2.7/3.2, I am in the process of removing modules in Distutils that
>> can be replaced by calls to existing functions in stdlib. For
>> instance, "dir_util" and "file_util" (old modules from the Python 1.x
>> era) are going away in favor of calls to shutil (and os), so the
>> Distutils package gets lighter.
>>
>> Another module I would like to move away from Distutils is
>> "archive_util". It contains helpers to build archives, whether they
>> are zip or tar files. I propose to move those useful functions into
>> shutil, as this seems the most logical place.
>
> If it's archive-agnostic then shutil is probably the best place.

In more details:
It allows the creation of gzip, bzip2, tar and zip files through a single API.
There's a registry of supported formats and the API is driven by a
format identifier.

To do the work it uses stdlib's compression modules. Although it tries
the "zip" system command as a fallback if the "zipfile" module is not
present.

(notice that I've removed the support of "compress" (.Z) some time ago)

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org