On Thu, Jun 15, 2017, at 03:10 PM, C Anthony Risinger wrote: > I'm not trying to open a bikeshedding opportunity here -- and I tried > to ignore it, honest! -- but why are tarballs preferable to zipfiles > for sdists?> > ... > > Just seems a little odd/arbitrary to me that wheel is zip, python > supports zip importing, sdists are often zip, and Windows is zip- > central, but we'd decide to codify tar.gz. I've wondered about that. My rationale for specifying tar.gz in PEP 517 is that we had decided in a previous discussion to move towards standardising on that - specifically, to change distutils/setuptools to default to making tar.gz sdists everywhere, rather than defaulting to zip on Windows. >From what I recall of that discussion, the rationale was:
1. A significant majority of existing sdists are in tar.gz format, so standardising that is less disruptive than standardising zip.2. Zip files are better when you want to access individual files from the archive, but tarballs are marginally better when you want to unpack the whole thing into a directory before using it. We think that sdists are normally used by unpacking them. Thomas
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