[Distutils] MANIFEST destiny :)

[Paul Moore]

On 11/17/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

> That's certainly part of it; but it's certainly not all of it.  Mostly,
> it's the difference between being a tool and a framework.  The distutils
> provides all the mechanism you like, and none of the policy.  That was a
> brilliant political move, as it dodges all the infighting that otherwise
> would have stopped it getting off the ground.  However, there's no longer
> any reason *not* to have One Official Python Way To Do It, and to
> streamline the tools around that philosophy.

This seems to me to be a good point. However, wouldn't a relatively
simple way of addressing it be just to *document* the One Official Way
(ideally, in the Python documentation, but maybe hosted elsewhere as
well for users of current and older versions)? You're right in saying
(elsewhere, I think - I can't find the exact quote now) that the
distutils documentation is a bit lacking in "how should I do it" help
like this.

You could add a footnote somewhere that setuptools is limited to
support of projects following this approach.

Paul.