Provide zstd compressed install only release artifacts?

[indygreg]

This project's release artifacts are continuing to gain popularity.

I initially only published the zstd compressed full archives for use with PyOxidizer. Then when people discovered the utility of the distributions and they wanted smaller downloadable artifacts, we made the install_only archive variants. I chose .tar.gz at the time because of the ubiquity of zlib and knew I couldn't get away with zstd only.

We still need to provide gzip archives for compatibility I suspect. But I'm wondering if we should provide zstd compressed archives so customers could speed up decompression by a few seconds. This could matter for things like GitHub Actions. Every second can count!

WDYK @charliermarsh? Would uv benefit from the speedup from zstd archives?

[indygreg]

Actually, the time savings may be <1.0 now with the stripped distributions. The size of the debug symbols and raw object files made zstd a very obvious advantage with the full archives. But maybe gzip with stripped is small enough the >5x slower decompression doesn't translate to a meaningful wall time difference?

[charliermarsh]

We could try it out and benchmark it in uv? We seamlessly support gzip and zstd already, so we’d just need to generate the assets.