[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[David Cournapeau]

P.J. Eby wrote:
> At 08:08 PM 4/6/2009 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> Does this actually fail under setuptools?  It should not, as RPM
> building from an sdist would then fail, and there was code
> specifically added to ensure that use case works.
>
> Have you actually tested this, or are you simply theorizing?

I had some recent failure with paver + numpy.distutils + setuptools
combination as late as last week. I am not saying it is setuptools's
fault (it may well be a problem in numpy), but I can't know for sure
because there are many different ways to generate this list of sources.
The problem is not doing it with VCS as much as there are many ways in
different conditions that only a very few people understand as of today.

As a numpy developer who messes quite a bit with distutils and
numpy.distutils extensions, I hope we can get rid of all this magic as
much as possible. It is ok for *tools* to be magic, as long as they
write their *data* to a commonly understood and specified format. But
for now, setuptools enforce some behavior that other tools can't mimic,
because setuptools' way is implementation defined. And for other parts
of packaging, maybe numpy.distutils is implementation defined, without
the possibility for other tools to mimic this either.

That's why  IMHO distutils should be as straightforward as possible, so
you can build up things on top of it. Some people like setuptools'
behavior w.r.t VCS; but it should be possible for my package and for my
potential distutils extensions to stay compatible with distutils,
whether I am using setuptools or not. Otherwise, when there are N tools
which are all implementation defined for packaging, it becomes
intractable very quickly.

cheers,

David