[Distutils] The "dist" command

[Greg Ward]

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
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