Add option to create tar.gz files.

[yesimon]

I see in this line that maybe python 2.4 has some issues with creating tar.gz files

zest.releaser/zest/releaser/release.py

Line 105 in 08bde24

# Due to a bug in python24, tar files might get corrupted on READ.

However since that's a really old python by now, can we add an option to upload tar files to pypi?

[reinout]

The current option forces setuptools to generate a zipfile. I guess that's not really needed anymore.

So... instead of adding a tar option, I'd rather say "we don't need to pass the zip option anymore". Setuptools will then use some default, which is probably tgz files.

@mauritsvanrees: tgz is probably fine now?

[mauritsvanrees]

Probably okay. I started writing that we should still check for the Python version: if it is 2.4.x we should still use zip. But looking at our setup.py we only support Python 2.6 and 2.7. So should be okay to remove our zip default.

There is a nagging doubt in the back of my mind, because I had some problems recently with a tarball that I created on my Mac and that could not be extracted on some Linux server. Problem was that I was using the Mac standard /usr/bin/tar which is bsdtar. Switching to a port install of GNU tar fixed it. But this was with a git archive command, not with zest.releaser or setuptools. setuptools may be using some internal or base Python tar version. Not sure. But as two data points on PyPI: for setuptools both .zip and .tgz are uploaded, and for pip only .tgz is uploaded. I guess we would know if there were problems with .tgz and recent Python versions.

Long story short: should be okay. :-)

BTW, I think whether zip or targz or something else is used by default depends on the OS. Indeed, see https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/sourcedist.html. If you want to override the default behavior you can add a setup.cfg to your Python project and put this in it, with one or more formats:

[sdist]
formats = zip,gztar

[reinout]

Hm... I am getting all sorts of hard-to-debug doctest failures. The common problem.
Note: I made the change on master...

[yesimon]

Is this related to tgz files?

[mauritsvanrees]

Yep, the expected sometimes-I-fail-sometimes-I-dont related to 'tags dir does not exist' where we try to answer 'no, do not create it' first, and it creates it anyway. Something like that.

[reinout]

Ok, tests are OK again.

Released as 3.56 and.... it is a tgz automatically :-)
https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/z/zest.releaser/zest.releaser-3.56.tar.gz

[mauritsvanrees]

@yesimon: the 'Yep' was for Reinout. As answer to you: No, the doctest failures are not related to tgz files, they have been here for a while, sometimes failing sometimes not.... :-(

See https://travis-ci.org/zestsoftware/zest.releaser/builds/54873008