[Distutils] sdist default archive format

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 3:57 AM, Ben Finney<ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Trent Mick <trentm at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> My preferences is for .zip (that is what I use for my packages), the
>> main reason is that Windows users can always unpack a .zip file. Often
>> that is not true for .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 files.
>
> The reverse is true on Unix. The tar-and-gzip format is extensively used
> so it is pretty much guaranteed to be readable on any Unix system; the
> Zip format does not have anywhere near the same level of guarantee.
>
> I would think the best solution is to use the tar format (since, as
> pointed out elsewhere, it has better support for symlinks and permission
> flags that are often important when distributing works), and ensure that
> distutils will include a tool for unpacking them with pure Python on
> those platforms without external support for the format.
>

+1

A end-user that uses easy_install ends up calling the stdlib tarfile
module to unpack the archives,
so it works out of the box.  I guess pip is also using that code
(unpack_archive in setuptools.archive_util)

Although, I would rather see a new high-level function in tarfile
itself, callable from the __main__ section,
to pack/unpack an archive provided in the arguments. (like the doctest
modules has).

Cheers
Tarek