Nick Coghlan brought up the fact that with Larry Hastings doing periodic tarball dumps for the 3.4.0 release it would be good to make sure instructions on how to actually test from a tarball were in the devguide.

Brett, Is documentation for a testing a tarball dumped for an RC still needed? 

If so, are the following steps accurate?

1. Download tarball
2. Extract tarball into a directory
   tar -xzvf release.tar.gz
3. Change directory into release directory
   cd release
4. Install the release
   sudo python setup.py install

My assumption: After installation above, testing should be similar to the existing devguide instructions for testing.

Thoughts?

I don't know if Larry is planning to do tarball releases for 3.5 (added him to the nosy to see).

As for the install step, it would be best to suggest people install to a temp directory so they don't accidentally end up with a beta release stuck on their machines, e.g. `make --prefix=/tmp/cpython`.

I don't plan on doing tarball-only drops during the 3.5 beta/rc period like I did during 3.4.  However, when I do a release (e.g. 3.5.0a4), I release Windows binaries (built by Steve Dower), OS X binaries (built by Ned Deily), and source in tarballs.  If you're on anything but Windows or OS X you have to build it yourself, from a tarball.  So it probably makes sense to have instructions in the dev guide on how to do it.

Possibly silly q: how does one /make/ a Python release tarball? 'make dist' which is the autoconf standard complains that it has no such target...

How to do it is part of PEP 101 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0101/).

To make the tarballs, I use the "release.py" script from here:

https://hg.python.org/release

and run "release.py --export <versionnumber>".  I haven't peeked inside the black box to see how the sausage is made.

I don't think this is worth doing.