[Python-Dev] Re: Planning to drop gzip compression for futurereleases.

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> agreed.  it may come as a surprise to some people, but Linux
> is not the only Unix system out there.  Python works extremely
> well on non-Linux systems too...

But then, a Unix system does not have gzip, either. So we probably
should use compress(1), or, better yet, distribute uncompressed
tar files. Perhaps we should use cpio instead, or pax, because
we need to avoid GNU tar extensions. Maybe IP isn't available, either,
so we should ship QIC tapes.

On Solaris, bzip2 is in the SUNWbzipS package, and installs into
/usr/bin.

Regards,
Martin

P.S. Just found this on compress(1) of Solaris 9:

NOTES
      Although compressed files are  compatible  between  machines
      with large memory, -b 12 should be used for file transfer to
      architectures with a  small  process  data  space  (64KB  or
      less).

Solaris 9 requires a 512MB swap partition for installation, and the
installer makes heavy use of Java...