[Distutils] The "dist" command

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Greg Ward writes:
 > I'm not sure what you mean by "complete" -- if the defaults are sensible
 > (get all source files mentioned in or implied by 'packages',

  I mean that if a manifest file is used, the defaults should not be.
This should be an either/or decision for the developer.

 > -- ie. the first "word" ('.' in this case) has to be a directory, under
 > which the following include/exclude patterns apply recursively.
 > Unfortunately, I don't think this will work under my proposed
 > algorithm.  Will have to think about it more tonight.

  Yeah, that's right: just fix the algorithm!  ;-)

 > commands, *and* you want to build in a funny directory (ie. other than
 > ./build), then you have to supply a --build-base option to both
 > commands.  Icky, but I can't think of a nice way around it.  (Anyone
 > with a better idea is welcome to read the source code *before* shooting
 > from the hip.)  

  That's totally bogus; I'll take a look at the code as soon as I have 
time (around March 2020, I think ;).

I said:
 >   Version should be explicitly specified somewhere.

And Greg said:
 > And I'm inclined to say, "It must be explicitly specified in setup.py"
 > rather than in any particular source file.  The only problem with this

  That's about right.  I don't really care where it is, as long as
we're *not* doing heuristic extraction from sources or documentation.

 > Anyone have a problem with requiring the version number be specified in
 > setup.py?  That means the __version__ attribute in modules has no real
 > meaning, since dependency checking would have to be done through the

  Package version and module version are two different things; don't
confuse them.  The package database, once it exists, should only
contain package information.


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives