I was looking into Python’s recent new support for ZStandard that was added in 3.14. I wanted to try porting some usage of shutil.make_archive and was surprised that "zstdzip” was not a format argument option.
The zipfile module has ZIP_ZSTANDARD as an option
Was curious if I was missing something, this was an intentional omission, or something that simply hasn’t been requested/implemented.
Probably mostly this? I notice that shutil.make_archive doesn’t expose formats for any other zip compression methods either (e.g., there is no bzzip or xzzip or storedzip). My guess is there just hasn’t been much of a community need yet / no one has made the pitch.
Do you know if there’s been any past discussions about adding shutil.make_archive support for any of the other compression methods that zipfile supports? If other compression methods have been turned down in the past, then similar reasons may apply here.
Could not have said it better!
Also note that shutil.unpack_archive does support Zstandard-based zip files, but that is transparent as a side-effect of support in zipfile.
I just started playing with Zstandard (very impressed as it is so much faster and compresses better than DEFLATE).
I find make_archive a very nice convenience interface for making a compressed archive, and since "zstdtar” exists, it seemed like a Zip-equivalent could be nice.
Writing a wrapper around zipfile to reimplement make_archive isn’t super hard (especially in the days of LLMs), but I felt given how powerful Zstandard is, exposing it to the one-line wrapper would be nice.