[Distutils] The "dist" command

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

M.-A. Lemburg writes:
 > In my packaging tool I also have the notion of directory local
 > manifest files, ie. the local manifest can override the global
 > patterns to e.g. include files that would normally be excluded.

  Hmm.  Thinking about using manifest files which are fully explicit,
perhaps the syntax should be reconsidered.  Perhaps each line should
start with a known token, from the set "include", "file", "dir".
"include" could be used to include a subdirectory's local manifest.
All file/directory names should be resolved relative to the manifest
file that contains the name, and should never refer to parent
directories.  For example:

        include tools/MANIFEST
        file    README INSTALL COPYING
        file    setup.py
        dir     docs

 > Also, I have two possibilities for choosing the manifest:
 > one for source distribution and one for binary distribution.
 > Something like it in distutils would be nice too.

  This is cool; as long as the manifest can be specified from the
command line it should be easy to adjust the defaulting of the
filename:  if MANIFEST.SRC is present, it is used for the source dist, 
otherwise use MANIFEST, or the default rules.  The same for
MANIFEST.BIN.  (Or whatever names they have.)

 > Note that it would also be nice to have "dist" produce a meta
 > information Python module that it automatically includes in the

  What would this contain and how would it be used?

 > Which options for the archive format do you consider ?
 > I'm currently using .zip, .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.bz2 and .tz2.

  Seems like all can be supported and selected by configuration and
command line option.

 > Just in case you have missed my current tool set:
 > 
 > 	http://starship.skyport.net/~lemburg/pkgtools-0.1.0.zip

  Hmm, no README, INSTALL, or LICENSE....  I'll see if I can figure it 
out!  ;-)  Thanks for the pointer.
  Greg, perhaps a pointer on the Distutils-SIG page on python.org
would be useful?


  -Fred

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