On 21 August 2016 at 08:40, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: >> >> If we're going through all this trouble, isn't it better just to jump to >> .zip files like every other distribution format in existence? > > Yes. :-)
zip is popular for *user facing* distribution formats, where the file format is exposed directly to end users, and end user applications (e.g. zipimport, ODF). That's not where tarballs shine, so it's not where they show up: tar is a backend infrastructure format, used for tool-to-tool communication, rather than user-to-user. The trajectory of distutils-sig for the past few years has been towards a world where sdists are primarily a tool-to-tool format for data interchange between publishing tools (e.g. twine), installation tools (e.g. pip) and redistribution tools (e.g. conda, RPM, deb, buildout), with wheels (and potentially eggs, or an equally zipimport friendly future derivative) being the preferred formats for working directly with Python software in a destination environment (whether that's a system integrator's build farm, a production software deployment, or a Python user's local system). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig