[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[David Cournapeau]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> Nobody has anywhere in this discussion suggested anything that in any
> shape, form or way prevents any sort of other usage.
>   

It does if the underlying implementation is not shared correctly between
all the tools. Having plugins to support VCS is ok, as long as the data
used by it can be used.

>
> You agree that distutils have a problem in this area. Setuptools
> overrides the behaviour so that it is less broken, to fix your usecase
> and include files you want included, but which distutils would not
> include. And then you complain that setuptools doesn't create the
> exact same sdist as distutils.
>
> Yeah, that makes sense. Not.
>   

It is ok for different tools to handle things differently *if I can get
those data back*. That's the fundamental problem as of today. An example

distutils sdist  -> setuptools expands the sdist command -> paver
extends the sdist command from setuptools
                         -> another tool expands sdist directly from
distutils

Now, how can I use the distribution files produced by setuptools/paver
in another tool. If there is no way to share this data reliably, that's
a misfeature. That's why a common, underlying low level thing which can
be merged reliably by different tools is needed.

David