On 12/5/2010 10:11 PM, Brett Cannon wrote: > On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 13:06, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar...@v.loewis.de> 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? >> >> These questions are difficult to answer with the download stats alone. >> If you really want to know, we should setup a poll... > > I could if people care, but I don't anyone does. > >> >>> Are there >>> actual platforms that can't handle tar.bz2 but can handle tgz? >> >> That, in turn, is easy to answer: yes, there are. Certain Solaris >> releases had gzip available (even though /usr/bin/tar wouldn't know >> how to invoke it), but no bzip2 utility. > > If these are Solaris platforms we support then that's fine and we > should keep tgz files, but if these are platforms we no longer care > about then I say the lives of release managers should be simplified by > cutting tgz files. > >> >>> 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). >> >> Not sure what page you are looking at; on >> >> http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/ >> >> we do. > > I was actually looking at that page, but the size specifics are below > the download links and are only noticeable if you scroll far enough > down. I doubt I am the only person who has made that mistake. > > -Brett > >> >>> 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. >> >> You would also need to specify what page you refer to as "the download >> page". >> Surely this is all bike shedding. Will anyone fail to download Python because we don't offer a .xz foramt download? I sincerely doubt it. So what do we gain by such an addition to compensate for the increasing complexity to be faced during releases?
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