[Distutils] The "dist" command

[Mikael Lyngvig]

Hi Greg,

[Sorry for jumping in rather abruptly; I've been busy moving to and from the
UK recently...]

> Hey, I was smirking when I said that.  The whole point of having some
> wildcard support in the Distutils MANIFEST format is that people don't
> need to use 'find', or a separate "make_manifest" script to generate it:
> they just type a few lines and it works.  You and Marc-André have come
> up with some clever ideas that will allow people to type even fewer
> lines in some circumstances, at the expense of more complexity in the
> code.

My two pennies (with a bit of luck I'll comment on something you recognize):

Manifest files should be as explicit as possible.  I.e., wildcards should
only be allowed in a preprocessor tool for generating the initial manifest
file.  The reason for this is simply that you don't want to accidentally
ship your boss' latest hate mail to you, because you accidentally saved it
in the source directory :)  (so, I prefer the 'make_manifest' approach)

As for 'find', I am still, extremely slowly, working on Python replacements
for the most common Unix/GNU utilities.  It would be kind of nifty to have a
'find' module written so generically, using keyword parameters, that you
could use if from your own Python scripts:

   User = os.environ["USER"]
   Edits = posixcmd.find("/src", perm="-u+w", name="*.c", type="f",
user=User)
   if Edits == []:
      print "You can go home now, %s.  See you tomorrow." % User
   else:
      print "You need to check in the following files %s:" % User
      for Edit in Edits:
         print "\t%s" % Edit


-- Mikael