[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

Marius Gedminas marius at pov.lt
Wed Apr 8 09:40:18 CEST 2009


On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 07:27:29PM +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 19:12, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> 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.
> 
> But how would it break? It would in that case possibly include *more*
> files, as it instead would default to including everything, and not
> only VCS files, so you might get intermediary build files included as
> well, in worst case. Or Alice's project file, or similar.

Are we talking about the current design (which doesn't include
everything), or about some proposed change?

I kind of lost track.

Some redundant background (already seen upthread):

    My personal meeting with this issue was when the application failed
    to work correctly because it was missing some Javascript files due
    to the fact that the released version was built from a tarball
    produced with svn export.  And no, that tarball could not have been
    built with setup.py sdist instead of svn export---it contained more
    than one package and some of those weren't setuptoolized yet (and
    some of those weren't really Python packages).

    I'm repeating this to indicate that in my experience,
    svn-metadata-less builds with no explicit MANIFEST.in do not in fact
    include everything by default.

> But the distribution would not be exactly the same, this is true. Is
> that a problem?

Assuming the distribution is complete and has extra files: no, it
wouldn't necessarily be a problem.

Including extra cruft is inelegant, but not broken (unless that extra
cruft breaks builds somewhere else, because the files in question are
arch-specific and do not get rebuilt---a hypothetical use case probably
not applicable to Python packages).

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Favorite MAC error message: "Not enough memory to eject disk!"
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20090408/303a8e9d/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Distutils-SIG mailing list