[Python-Dev] Enhancing the shutil module (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Sun Jan 17 21:43:05 CET 2010

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:15 PM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote: [..]

Are these functions portable? Do they rely on external programs?

I believe that part of the work that Tarek has been doing has been to make these distutils commands use the Python standard library and not depend on external programs. In which case they seem like excellent additions to the shutil module.

yes, in the past the "tar" files where created using the "tar" command but this has been changed. For a while now, they are portable and they use stdlib code only. A recent addition is to be able to define user/group permissions in the tar files, thanks to Lars' work in the tarfile module.

There's one remaining external call for "zip" done if the zip module is not found, but I am happy to remove it and throw an exception if it's not found, and keep the external "zip" call on Distutils side, so shutil stays 100% stdlib-powered.

Of course Tarek can speak for himself...

Thanks for explaining it ! :)

Regards Tarek

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org

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