[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[P.J. Eby]

At 12:25 PM 4/6/2009 +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
>On Sun, Apr 05, 2009 at 07:51:41PM -0400, P.J. Eby wrote:
> > At 11:24 PM 4/5/2009 +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> >> On Sun, Apr 05, 2009 at 06:45:45PM +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> >> > After some discussions with people at Pycon, we think that the
> >> > MANIFEST template should be removed.
> >>
> >> +1 for fixing the mess that setuptools + distutils manage to make out of
> >> the manifest (MANIFEST.in + old MANIFEST lying around + .svn metadata =>
> >> lots of confusion and lack of reproducibility)
> >
> > If you've reported this as a problem or filed a bug for it, I appear to
> > have missed it.  Steps to reproduce, and the expected vs. actual
> > behavior would be helpful.
>
>Sorry about that, I though it was working as designed (having seen
>discussions about it here on this list).
>
>   1. Build a package from an svn checkout -> it works
>   2. Build a package from a tree exported with svn export -> it fails,
>      since the MANIFEST.in is nonexistent/incomplete, but you never
>      notice that while developing
>   3. Change the test fixture to ignore .svn subdirectories when tarring
>      up the working tree and copying it into the virtual machine for
>      building (cannot use svn export here, since the tests need to test
>      your working tree with uncommitted changes).

Can't you use an sdist here instead of a manually-created 
tarball?  Or would that not fix the problem for some reason?