The packaging commands sdist and bdist can create various kinds of archives.  The function used to create them is thankfully just a thin wrapper around shutil.make_archive (extracted from distutils), and sdist also uses shutil.get_archive_formats to validate its --formats option.  bdist however maintains its own registry.

The docstrings, help texts and reST documentation also contain out-of-sync duplicate lists of allowed formats.

I’m working on a patch to fix this duplication.