[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[David Cournapeau]

Tres Seaver wrote:

>
> It is often true for *lots* of release management strategies that the
> release managers have to do extra work to create a release tarball
> (e.g., re-run autogen, etc., or flex / bison, etc.), and that the
> released tarball does not include enough information to rebuild itself
> (as opposed to re-tgz'ing it).

I have yet encountered a package from autotools where make dist did not
work from the pristine sources. Something like autogen.sh is only needed
if you modify the autotools "scripts" (configure.ac, Makefile.in/am,
etc...).

> Nobody but a package maintainer should be making sdists.

But my use cases are from a maintainer POV ! In particular, I like
checking that sdist actually works in my release scripts (something like
make distcheck) - which is exactly my rationale for the above example.

cheers,

David