[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[David Cournapeau]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
>
> It's a practical default.
>   

It is practical on the short term, but a pain in the long term. The
single most problematic aspect of distutils (and the tools above it) is
all this magic which works in some simple cases, and breaks in other,
without any way to circumvent it. A distribution tool has to be simple
and customizable, not magic.

For example, all those different, slightly different behaviors of what
goes where means that depending on whether you use distutils, setup.py
sdist, paver sdist, setuptools setup.py sdist, your tarball is
different. That's just insane, and the only way to make it work is to
have *one simple way* to tell what goes where. Distutils should be
simplified, not made even more complicated. Tarball generation is
typically an area where there is too much magic.

If there is one simple way to make sdist, then you can build your own
tools to integrate with your DVCS if you want. But the data produced and
fed by/from tools have to be simple. Put the magic in the tools, not in
the data :)

cheers,

David