[Distutils] How to prevent some .egg-info files being "touched" during a build/install process

[Matt Good]

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 11:00 -0700, Venkat Bommakanti wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have an app that I'm using setuptools to
> build/install. During the build process (I think), it
> "touches" the following files:
>   ...
>   myapp/src/app/app.egg-info/PKG-INFO
>   myapp/src/app/app.egg-info/SOURCES.txt
>   myapp/src/app/app.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
>   myapp/src/app/app.egg-info/requires.txt
>   myapp/src/app/app.egg-info/top_level.txt
>   ...
> even though none of the files in the app were
> modified.
> As a result the source control system thinks there are
> new versions of these files. THough they are not
> marked changed by the source control system, the fact
> that they are being flagged as being "tocuhed" is
> causing confusion amongst folks in my team unrelated
> to my comp - when they see that their changes
> elsewhere - is affecting my comp.
> 
> Since these files are deployed as part of the install
> step, looks like they have to be included under source
> control. Is there a way to ask setuptools to not
> "touch" these files if nothing underlying has changed.

I typically add the .egg-info folder to the "ignored" files in version
control since the files in there will be automatically regenerated by
the build process.  Unless you have custom files that you put in
the .egg-info folder (which I think is uncommon) you can probably just
leave that folder out of version control too.

BTW what version control is this?  Most VC systems I've used are smart
enough to only show files as "changed" if the content has changed, not
just the timestamp.

-- Matt Good