[Distutils] pypi and easy_install

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:44 AM 1/19/2008 +0100, Giampaolo Rodola' wrote:
>Ok, I tried to implement this and it is seems I made it.
>The change permit to use the distutils "--formats=tar,gztar,bztar"
>option without need of having tar/gzip/bzip2 utilities installed on
>the system.
>Don't know if distutils test suite includes tests for the part of code
>I modified but Lib/test/test_distutils.py run successfully on Python
>2.5.1.
>
>The only compression format currently left out is ztar.
>I may be wrong but I haven't seen modules able to work with that
>format in the Python stdlib.
>
>I'll wait for your review.
>Tell me if you want me to open a ticket on the Python bug tracker to
>let also other users review the patch, modify something or throw the
>whole thing away. :-)

That would probably be a good idea.  In the meantime, my only comment 
is that for consistency with make_zipfile, the code should work even 
if gzip, tarfile, or bz2 aren't importable.  That is, falling back to 
the old spawn-based methods if the relevant library or libraries are 
not available.  The comment at the top, after all, says "This module 
should be kept compatible with Python 2.1," and the tarfile and bz2 
modules weren't added until 2.3.  (I'm not sure when gzip was added.)