On Dec 5, 2010, at 9:55 PM, Brett Cannon wrote: > 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?
I prefer tgz over tar.bz2 because my fingers are more used to typing gz* than bz*, and because it's more likely that gzip will be installed than bzip. But my habits were formed before bzip was even available. I have chosen bzip over gzip in cases where I know that download bandwidth was limited but otherwise I use gzip. Plus, Python comes with a gzip module. ;) > Are there actual platforms that can't handle tar.bz2 > but can handle tgz? I can test this tomorrow when I visit my client and type "bzip" into a box there, but I think the answer is "yes." This is a 3-4 year old Linux box where I had to install a number of packages just to get it to state where I could compile Emacs 23.x, since their package installer doesn't have a new enough Emacs version. Short version: most of the users log into the Linux box to run pre-compiled chemistry applications. They aren't doing development on the machines. If Python was only available in bzip then I would have to install bzip myself - which isn't hard - while I grumble that it's more work for me for little savings. After all, in these cases I'm at a large pharmaceutical company with plenty of bandwidth, so the savings of a few MB won't be noticeable. They sure aren't going to have xz. So, drop .tar.gz and I can still handle it. > 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. While I would say to drop the bz2 and make it an xz instead. *shrug* it's no big deal either which way. If this is something you want to figure out, there's no need for a poll. This is near ideal case for A/B testing. Swap the two lines now and see what changes. And watch the referrer logs to identify which downloads come from that page. Before today I had never even heard of .xz files. For others who haven't heard of it, it's based on the LZMA2 algorithm, which is a slight improvement on the LZMA algorithm which 7zip uses. It's been for about 2 years, and so I'm surprised to see that it's part of the GNU coreutils already. Here's a short read about the history http://linuxgazette.net/162/lindholm.html with some numbers as well. It looks like the compression time is a lot longer than gzip. This page http://stephane.lesimple.fr/wiki/blog/lzop_vs_compress_vs_gzip_vs_bzip2_vs_lzma_vs_lzma2-xz_benchmark_reloaded recommends gzip if you want compression speed, and xz if you want smaller size. Andrew da...@dalkescientific.com _______________________________________________ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
