id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	launchpad_bug
298	making compressed tarballs the distutils way	zooko	warner	"In http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/misc/make-tarballs.sh?rev=2028 Brian wrote of lrzip: ""it is disabled because I cannot find a debian package for it. zooko, where did you find this thing?"".

http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/lrzip/

(It's the i-feel-lucky for ""lrzip"".)

(The fraction of the free software world which is packaged in Debian is small and shrinking.  ;-))

However, I think lrzip is pretty much overshadowed by 7z, at least for our uses:

{{{
-rw-rw-r-- 1 zooko zooko 5813055 Jan 31 12:23 dist/allmydata-tahoe-0.7.0-204.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 zooko zooko 1909293 Jan 31 12:23 dist/allmydata-tahoe-0.7.0-204.tar.rz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 zooko zooko 4398595 Jan 31 12:23 dist/allmydata-tahoe-0.7.0-204.tar.bz2
-rw------- 1 zooko zooko 1781228 Jan 31 12:24 dist/allmydata-tahoe-0.7.0-204.tar.7z
-rw-rw-r-- 1 zooko zooko 1796885 Jan 31 12:24 dist/allmydata-tahoe-0.7.0-204.tar.lrz
}}}

So this triggered me to remember that distutils will actually do this for us.

(Making tarballs compressed in various ways is one of those many tasks which it would be nice if we didn't script them in our {{{Makefile}}} or our {{{misc/}}} script directory, but instead a generic distutils command would do it for us.)

http://docs.python.org/dist/source-dist.html

At this time it won't do rzip, 7z, or lrzip for us but these are, after all, fringe tools that I just threw in because it was easy rather than because some users really demanded them.

So I propose to remove {{{misc/make-tarballs.sh}}} in favor of {{{./setup.py sdist --formats=bztar,gztar,zip}}}.  (And thus we gain a widely used format -- .zip -- which I overlooked because it isn't unix-friendly.)

And some later date I'll probably contribute a patch to distutils or setuptools to add 7z to the list of formats.  :-)"	enhancement	closed	major	eventually	packaging	0.7.0	fixed