[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[Lennart Regebro]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 15:02, Floris Bruynooghe
<floris.bruynooghe at gmail.com> wrote:
> The VCS is an external piece of software outside of Python and the
> distutils.  There also isn't just one VCS, there's many of them and
> all of them are on different release schedules which differ from
> Python's and/or distutils's release schedules and can thus break API,
> or datastore semantics at any time (I think this was demonstrated with
> setuptools and svn 1.5 but not sure since I don't use setuptools).
> Therefore for distutils to actually depend on a VCS to function seems
> dangerous and a massive maintenance burden.

I never said it should depend on it. Just that it should be able to
get a file list from the VCS, if a file list isn't otherwise
explicitly defined. No arguments against this has come forward.

> But the basic problem stays the same, distutils can be broken by
> external software.

As mentioned earlier we of course can't rely on internal VCS file
formats to stay the same. Code that does that should not be a part of
the standardlib. But is that really an argument against the principle?

> I do acknowledge that for some people this is exactly what they want
> and indeed can see the benefit of integrating with your VCS.  So yes,
> that should be made possible.  But as has been said numerous times
> distutils should move to some common data formats so that different
> tools can be used to provide this type of extra-sweet functionality
> for a subset of the users.

Of course.

>> 1. If there is explicit definitions, use that.
>> 2. If not, then if there is a VCS, use that.
>> 3. If not, include all files except those extensions that are known to
>> be temporary files.
>>
>> Where in this is there a "lower level"?
>
> Number 1 could be the simple lower level, a list of files

It's all a list of files. It's a question of how that list is
generated. "Manually" is not lower level, it's just impractical.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Pythonista, Barista, Notsotrista.
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
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