[Catalog-sig] Distutils sdist formats best practice

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Alex Clark <aclark at aclark.net> wrote:
> What is the best practice for creating sdists with varying compression
> formats?

In the past it was best to create .zip files for all platforms. This
was largely to avoid problems in Python's tarfile module in Python 2.4
and maybe 2.5, which failed to extract files whose combined path and
file name was exactly 100 characters long.

These days that's likely no longer a major concern.

Personally I'd still use zip files for all platforms, as all of them
by default have tools to open and extract these files. On *nix
platforms it's also not always clear if Python was built with bzip2
support or if that option was omitted.

Hanno