[Distutils] RFC : PEP 376 - egg.info

[P.J. Eby]

At 12:50 AM 5/5/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 7:51 PM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > At 06:01 PM 5/4/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 5:48 PM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> >> >> > I don't see any point to the normalization.
> >> >>
> >> >> To avoid different naming conventions like:
> >> >>
> >> >> PKG-INFO, requires.txt, SOURCES.txt
> >> >
> >> > And the problem with that is...?
> >>
> >> inconsistency, but right, it makes no sense if any file/dir can be added
> >> there.
> >>
> >> What about SOURCES.txt btw ? What is the reason to add it ?
> >
> > It's for source distributions.  It allows them to be able to rebuild an
> > identical source distribution in the absence of source control metadata.
> >
> > It's not really necessary for the installation process, although it's used
> > to figure out which files to install if you use include_package_data=True.
> >
>
>Any particular reason to call it "SOURCES.txt"  ?
>
>Or we can call it MANIFEST (with '/'-separated relative path)

I called it SOURCES.txt because MANIFEST is ambiguous as to what it's 
a manifest *of*, and also to distinguish it from any user-generated 
MANIFEST file.  (If you don't know about those, you're probably going 
to break backward compatibility w/somebody, btw.  Distutils usage is 
a diverse collection of nightmares.)

Anyway, the name of the file has no bearing on what distutils does, 
unless distutils is trying to implement the same feature as 
setuptools: i.e. round-trippable sdists whose original manifest was 
generated via revision control.