[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[David Cournapeau]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
>
> Sure, if the plugin can't use a stable API then it should not be
> included in the stdlib.
>   

I was not talking about the plugin stability, but about the situation
where the VCS detection is broken. As it has happened with setuptools
very recently.

>
> How does it break?
>   

If I have say the git plugin, and I run sdist in a git repo, but later
someone run sdist from my tarball: how can I be sure it is the same ?

> How is this different from any non-VCS situation?
>   

It is totally different: in the simple situation, I say which file to
include/not to include. So it is reproducible, whatever the situation
is. I won't have some ignored files because my own import does not have
the same ignored files as the original package.

>
> Can you explain what is different and when?
>   

No other distribution mechanism that I know of uses magic to detect
which files to distribute. Neither debian tools, nor rpm tools, nor
autotools. Not being explicit about files for distribution is a terrible
idea; a packaging tool should be explicit, to avoid as much as possible
to do something unexpected.

cheers,

David