[Doc-SIG] Distribution formats

[Beni Cherniavsky]

Aahz wrote on 2003-09-29:

> On Mon, Sep 29, 2003, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> > Aahz wrote on 2003-09-29:
> >> On Mon, Sep 29, 2003, Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Is there anyone currently relying on the gzipped archives who can't
> >>> use the bzip2 archives?  (How about the ZIP users?  Can they rely on
> >>> gzip or bzip2 archives?)
> >>
> >> WinZip (one of the standard Windows utilities) supports gzip, but I
> >> can't find any sign that they support bzip2.
> >
> > For windows, the Free `7-Zip`__ supports them all.
> >
> > __ www.7-zip.org
>
> While that's a Good Thing, I'm not sure it addresses the issue.  Should
> we be in a position where in order to access material on python.org,
> people have to download additional software?  I think it's reasonable to
> assume that people have either ZIP or bzip2, but I think that we'll get
> lots of whining if we only make bzip2 available.  (I'm already not
> looking forward to the complaints to webmaster if we remove gzip, but
> that's at least manageable.)
>
I agree.  I just pointed it out so it can be mentioned on the site
(better than nothing IMHO).  IIRC (I deleted the original message) one
of the things compressed in too many formats were the info files - at
least for them, you can safely ignore windows users that don't know to
handle bzip2 (because they surely won't know what to do with info
files ;).

--
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at users.sf.net>

Python - the best programming diet.