[python-committers] Providing .tgz sources

[Brett Cannon]

On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 11:43, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> Am 05.12.2010 20:39, schrieb "Martin v. Löwis":
>>> I wonder if it's still necessary to provide .tar.bz2 and .tgz source
>>> tarballs.  If anything, it would be nice to provide .tar.xz in addition
>>> to .tar.bz2, which has a nicer compression ratio:
>>
>> Looking at download statistics, for the 2.7 release, in July, we had
>> these numbers of downloads:
>>
>> Python-2.7.tgz     32059
>> Python-2.7.tar.bz2 24986
>> python-2.7.msi    577240
>>
>> In November, the numbers were
>>
>> Python-2.7.tgz       24535
>> Python-2.7.tar.bz2   20797
>> python-2.7.msi      569328
>
> OK, so the tgz is still more popular than the bz2 one, and that means
> it shouldn't go away.

Well, is it more popular because that is just what people are used to
downloading or the first download link on the web page? Or is it
because people fundamentally prefer tgz files over tar.bz2? Are there
actual platforms that can't handle tar.bz2 but can handle tgz? I'm
willing to bet it's because of the download link order and has nothing
to do with actual preference (especially since we don't state file
size on the download page).

Personally I don't know why we have both tgz and tar.bz2 other than
tradition. I say trim it down to tar.bz2 for portability and move on
to using a ustar-based tar.xz to be cutting edge and minimize download
size overall while making it the first download option to make sure
people notice it. I'd also vote for listing the file size on the
download page, but that's just another step for release managers that
I don't want to burden them with.

-Brett

>
> I've decided to make tar.xz tarballs available for the remaining 3.2
> prereleases; we'll see if anyone at all is interested in them.
>
> As for the .zip version, I've not found any requests for a source
> download with Windows-specific newlines.  I suppose that developers
> either check out directly from SVN, or have decompression programs
> and editors that can cope.
>
> cheers,
> Georg
>
> _______________________________________________
> python-committers mailing list
> python-committers at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
>