> Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
>> community members should be able to vote on patches
>
> *or* the core dev responsible for the development of the incriminated package, which is me for distutils.

This is said in the last part of the quoted msg107020:
"""In addition the part of this decision for particular component
of Python dist could be delegated to component maintainers preserving
RM's right to veto any opinion."""

> While distutils is now frozen, I agree that we can add it in 3.2

It would be nice if Python process could allow me to maintain my own
patched version of Python stdlibs so that I can use it instead of main
stdlib and quickly switch between them. It would be nice to be able to
share such patches and see in which versions (or forks) they were
integrated. I wonder if PSF license allows that?

> by the way, I am not sure what you call a binary sirting of zip files

I am not sure where did you see me mention that "binary sirting" too. =)

> (since two equivalent zip files can have different metadata) but if you mean comparing a unzip -l output, you could use zipinfo instead, to sort the output.

I use well-defined development toolchain for working with binary files
that can detect insignificant change in some kind of binary data like
timestamps in .zip archive, but comparing moving blocks is a disaster.
I need to analyze exact binary copies for troubleshooting issue8871
closely related to issue8870 to exclude any chance that binary .exe
generated by distutils on non-MS filesystem differs from the one
generated on MS FS. Even if it seems such a minor issue, believe me
that you do not want to meet any other minor issues when investigating
12 points checklist for some distutils bug that could be actually a
well-known MS problem, when the problem you need to solve is
misbehaving SCons installer that needs to install a couple of files in
somehow "seems to be protected" windows directories in Python
installation.

> Overall, you need to compare the size and CRC of each file. I don't know if zipinfo does this.
>
> Maybe this could be a feature in the zipfile module in python. a same_archive() function.

No. The archives should be generated consistently, but it is
impossible to create perfectly matching bdist_wininst archive anyway,
because timestamps will differ.

> FTR, this function has been moved to shutil, still with the zip shadowing and without the sorting.

Tarek, are you going to deal with shadowing?