> On Jun 15, 2017, at 10:10 AM, C Anthony Risinger <c...@anthonyrisinger.com> > wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com > <mailto:ncogh...@gmail.com>> wrote: > On 13 June 2017 at 19:44, Thomas Kluyver <tho...@kluyver.me.uk > <mailto:tho...@kluyver.me.uk>> wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 13, 2017, at 02:27 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote: > > > I've updated the PR to specify zip archives for build_wheel and .tar.gz > > archives for build_sdist. > > +1 > > I've added one suggestion, which is to explicitly require PAX_FORMAT > for the sdist tarballs produced this way (that's a POSIX format > standardised in 2001 and supported by both 2.7 and 3.x that > specifically requires that the paths be encoded as UTF-8). While the > standard library does still default to GNU_FORMAT in general, the > stated rationale for doing so (it being more widely supported than > PAX_FORMAT) was last updated more than 10 years ago, and I don't think > it applies here. > > 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? > > I looked around the 517 threads to see if it had been covered already, and > all I found was that zipfiles have additional PKG-INFO expectations in > existing implementations, and other honorable mentions of their features over > tarballs. > > I've never understood the anti-affinity towards zip because the format itself > seems superior in many ways, such as the ability to easily append or > replace-via-append (which might actually help perf when being used as an > interchange format, with a repack/prune at the end), compress individual > files, and the brilliance of placing the central directory/manifest at the > end, allowing it to be appended to binaries, etc. and allowing rapid indexing > of files. Tarballs are a black box. > > 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. It doesn't affect me personally because I'm Linux > all the way down and barely remember how to use Windows, but with all the > existing zip usage, and technical superiority(?), if we are going to pick > something, why not that? At that point Python is all-zip and no-tar. > > It's not a strong opinion really, but since the PEP does attempt to limit > what's currently possible, can we add some verbiage as to why tar.gz is > preferred? Or consider it with more scrutiny? >
Basically it’s the least disruptive option, the vast bulk of sdists are using ``.tar.gz`` already, multiple downstream redistributors need to do extra work to consume a .zip rather than a .tar.gz, and the technical benefits of wheel don’t really matter much in the context of a sdist. Zip isn’t a flat out win technical wise either, for instance .tar.gz can compress smaller than a .zip file because it’s compression will act over the entire set of files and not on a per file basis. But mostly it’s just that most sdists are .tar.gz, and most Pythons except older ones on Windows default to producing .tar.gz. — Donald Stufft
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