[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[P.J. Eby]

At 10:14 AM 4/6/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 09:51, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> So part of your file list is declared implicitely in your (D)VCS and
> >> part explicitely in your setup.
> >
> > I don't see how that would work. Reasonably, the VCS is a fallback of
> > nothing is declared in setup.py.
>
>Ok so, in version 1.2 of your package, you use the implicit way (VCS based)
>then you introduce a new file, that forces your to be explicit in 1.3
>so you use setup.py
>then in 1.4 you're back in an implicit list...  this is not a
>long-term solution indeed.

setuptools merges information from MANIFEST.in with information from 
source control. Essentially, MANIFEST.in lets you add things that are 
not in source control (e.g. if you have generated files) and to 
exclude things that *are* in soruce control.

In other words, with setuptools, MANIFEST.in simply describes any 
exceptions to the defaults, with regard to sdist inclusion.


> > I don't see why you should be forced
> > to explicitly declare every file in the setup.py, a sensible default
> > is not a problem.
>
>With glob-style patterns this is not a burden at all.

Have you ever *used* plain distutils for a significant project?  I 
invented the source control feature in setuptools because I was 
constantly ending up with files missing from my sdists, due to 
forgetting to add some sort of glob pattern to MANIFEST.in.  It's not 
going to be any better by putting those globs into setup.py.