Building .zip sdist files on posix systems

[matthewsht]

All,
I'm sorry to ask this here, but google (quite a lot of google) has failed me. I'm not even certain this is setuptools or build question.

I have multiple python packages for talking to our internal systems. These are system independant - however, I'm on a mac and want to build .zip based sdists so my colleagues on windows can easily pick up development.

How do I tell my setup.cfg to only (or at least also) build .zip sdists?

[abravalheri]

Hi @matthewsht, have you tried to add the following section to your setup.cfg?

[sdist]
formats = zip

However, this will not work with modern ways of creating distributions.

There is a spec (PEP 517) that requires sdists to be tar.gz files...

[matthewsht]

I just added that to my setup.cfg and the build still built a tar.gz sdists.

Relevent bits from the build include:
Writing npmp-0.8/setup.cfg
Creating tar archive
....
Successfully built npmp-0.8.tar.gz and npmp-0.8-py3-none-any.whl

I'm on setuptools 59.6.0 due to being on python 3.6
My build version is 0.7.0

[abravalheri]

Are you using the build package from PyPI (e.g. by running python -m build)?

If that is the case, I am afraid tar.gz is the only thing you can produce... (The build package follows the Python spec I mentioned before, PEP 517).

[abravalheri]

(Your colleagues using Windows should still be able to install tar.gz files with pip, and if they are willing to use the command line, they can still have access to the tar command on the CLI, which is present on Windows. Otherwise they can always use something like the 7zip program)

[matthewsht]

I am using PyPI build (0.7.0). I think thats a shortsight in PEP 517, but thats clearly not a setuptools problem.

Thank You! for the fast response and explanation - its appreciated.

[matthewsht]

From abravalheri above, the answer to my question is "you can't" and probably (to be PEP 517 compatible) "you don't want to".