[Distutils] Deviation between distutils and setuptools over package_data

[Nick Coghlan]

On 20 September 2013 00:02, Benjamin Root <ben.v.root at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, on a hunch, I tried making sure I had the latest version of setuptools
> installed (mine existing install was a little over a year old). On one
> system, easy_install found "setuptools 1.1.6" and installed it. After that,
> by setup.py script behaved exactly as expected on my demo package I mocked
> up to test out the bug. No need for "include_package_data", or MANIFEST.in
> or version control, just package_data. Great!
>
> To double-check, I tried it on another system (same version of python), and
> easy_install found "setuptools 1.1.6" as well and installed it. But the bug
> demo I made didn't work. Using "pydoc setuptools", it seems to have been
> pointing to distribute 0.6.28 for some reason. I retried "easy_install -U
> setuptools", and this time it found "distribute 0.7.3". After installing,
> "pydoc setuptools" now says that it is "setuptools 1.1.6". Why it didn't say
> that before, I haven't a clue. But the bug example package I made then
> worked. Don't know what to make of all that, but in the end, package_data
> did work as expected.

For a variety of reasons, versions of distribute prior to 0.7 actively
interfered with the usage of regular setuptools. With distribute 0.7+
(which was released after the two projects merged back together under
the original setuptools name), it's just an empty shell that depends
on the underlying setuptools.

So that's probably what you're seeing - the distribute version was
old, and preventing use of the updated setuptools. Once distribute was
updated as well, the new setuptools started to be used as expected.

> I will point out that even with setuptools 1.1.6, sdist isn't picking up all
> the files in version control, as I have a few other files under version
> control in my package that I didn't list for package_data. So, I still think
> there is an issue with crawling an SVN 1.7 repository.

That part I have no idea about :)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia