[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[Ben Finney]

David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes:

> Ben Finney wrote:
> > Okay, but that's a far cry from saying that it “doesn't make
> > sense” to use the VCS inventory.
> 
> Not that a far cry: python packaging tools are the only systems that
> I know of which does this. For example, in autotools, the tarball
> generated by make dist is never generated from the VCS.

I'm not advocating using the VCS to *generate the tarball*. I'm
talking about using the VCS to *determine what files to put in the
tarball*.

> I may have some weird tools in my VCS, or some huge test data,
> things which do not make sense to distribute.

Okay. I was addressing the claim that it makes no sense (i.e. it's
*always* wrong) to use the VCS inventory.

> Maybe I was not clear, but my point cannot be further from your
> suggestion :) sdist should not use the VCS, because a source tarball
> generated from the VCS and from sdist are not the same thing at all.

Your leap from “use the VCS inventory” to “cause the VCS to generate
the sdist tarball”, which is wrong.

I'm saying sdist should (in some cases, i.e. it makes sense sometimes,
i.e. it's not something that doesn't make sense) use the VCS inventory
to know what files form the source distribution.

> If you want a source checkout (which is what sdist does if you use
> the VCS), then use the VCS. Most good systems offer a service to
> automatically generate the source from the VCS if you need to make
> it available to people wo the VCS (trac, git and hg web frontends,
> etc...).

As you're no doubt aware, there's more to making an sdist than merely
making a tarball of the files; if nothing else, the metadata needs to
be assembled by {distutils, setuptools} and isn't stored directly in
the VCS. So I'm really not following your point here.

-- 
 \     “I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.” —Steven |
  `\                                                            Wright |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney