[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[zooko]

On Apr 7, 2009, at 11:12 AM, Marius Gedminas wrote:

> Consider a different use case: my friend's friend Alice does not  
> like svn.  She uses git-svn to get a local git repository  
> containing a copy of the subversion code.  She then uses the usual  
> 'python setup.py sdist' build process.  It produces a broken  
> distribution (silently) because setuptools doesn't support git, and  
> Alice didn't know she had to install a plugin.

For the Tahoe project, users can build from sdists (because they come  
with SOURCES.txt file listing all files) or from the official  
revision control tool (which is darcs).  Getting a copy of the files  
which didn't come from the official revision control tool and didn't  
come from an sdist is not supported, and as far as I know no-one has  
ever done it.  Nonetheless I worry about those sorts of rare, quiet  
failures so with PJE's help I added a clause in setuptools_darcs  
which will emit a warning message if there is no SOURCES.txt and also  
it fails to invoke the darcs executable:

http://allmydata.org/trac/setuptools_darcs/browser/setuptools_darcs/ 
setuptools_darcs.py?rev=54#L28

Here is the documentation about this issue in the setuptools_darcs  
plugin (I copied it from the setuptools-git plugin):

http://allmydata.org/trac/setuptools_darcs/browser/README.txt? 
rev=63#L103

Here is the documentation about this issue in the tahoe setup.py:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/setup.py?rev=3669#L122

I have not heard any complaints about this particular detail.  I have  
heard plenty of complaint about lots of other setuptools issues from  
lots of people.  The Big Two are still:

http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue53 # respect the PYTHONPATH

and

http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue54 # be more like distutils  
with regard to --prefix=

Regards,

Zooko