On 28 September 1999, M.-A. Lemburg said:
Greg, what we proposed here is not featuritis, it's plain experience. All of the mentioned things are needed one way or another.
Anyway, I guess that a simple tool to create the MANIFEST file will probably already do the trick for all of us. Perhaps you could add an option to choose the filename for it... e.g. -M <MANIFEST-filename>. Or have the dist tool look for a MANIFEST.py file and let it return the list of files to process via a get_files() API.
Already there; from distutils/distutils/command/dist.py: options = [('formats=', 'f', "formats for source distribution (tar, ztar, gztar, or zip)"), ('manifest=', 'm', "name of manifest file"), ] thus: python setup.py -v dist --manifest MyManifestFile or python setup.py -v dist -m MyManifestFile will do what you want. (Well, it *should*, I haven't tested it...) Please note, I have never said all of these ideas that have circulated are baseless or silly or unneeded. I just want some real developers to get real experience using the Distutils on real module distributions before we make a final decision about which all-singing, all-dancing solution is needed for manifest files. There's more than one way to do it, and I don't want to implement (or support or maintain) all of them. Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward@cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913