[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[David Cournapeau]

Lennart Regebro wrote:

> Well, because the tarball will include the files in the VCS. But sure,
> if you in the tarball case add files in the directory that are not in
> the VCS, that would be included too. Maybe that's a problem, I don't
> know. I can't see the problem myself, but maybe somebody else would
> have a case for that.
>   

My use case is very simple, and yet very common. If you have your
sources in a VCS system, say svn:

python setup.py sdist # put everything under svn into the tarball
cd dist && uncompress tarball && python setup.py sdist # the tarball is
not the same

That's a concrete example of what I mean by magic. The distributed files
depends on how where you build it. It means that someone who get this
tarball, modify it, and regenerate it cannot do it correctly.

The whole point of packaging tools is reproducibility. Using the VCS as
is done currently breaks this.

cheers,

David