SCons 4.8.0 wheel does not contain manpages

[mwichmann]

This is a summary of the topic brought up on the mailing list at https://pairlist4.pair.net/pipermail/scons-users/2024-July/009378.html

With SCons 4.8.0, the package building information transitioned from setup.cfg to pyproject.toml (see PR #4541). In the process, this stanza was dropped:

[options.data_files]
. = scons.1
        scons-time.1
        sconsign.1

That's expected: data_files is considered long-deprecated, and was not implemented in the pyproject.toml support of distutils, trying to include it raises an exception (configuration error: tool.setuptoolsmust not contain {'data_files'} properties). Unfortunately, the successor stanza which was in setup.cfg as:

[options.package_data]
* = *.txt, *.rst, *.1
SCons.Tool.docbook = *.*

and now appears in translated form in pyproject.toml as:

[tool.setuptools.package-data]
"*" = ["*.txt", "*.rst", "*.1"]
"scons.tool.docbook" = ["*.*"]

does not appear to pick up those three files with the wildcard (it doesn't help to spell them out, either).

The artifacts SCons itself produces no longer includes the manpage files. Listing the wheel (a zip file) shows these in the 4.7.0 release, with no equivalent in the 4.8.0 wheel:

    24954  03-18-2024 00:34   SCons-4.7.0.data/data/scons-time.1
   693084  03-18-2024 00:34   SCons-4.7.0.data/data/scons.1
     6427  03-18-2024 00:34   SCons-4.7.0.data/data/sconsign.1

We can argue whether the wheel files should contain the manpages, but this is a change between versions, so it is recorded here. Note that the "sdist" source distribution tarball does contain the manpage files, as does the full source tarball on SourceForge.

An additional change, possibly also caused by this transition - the sdist file and its contents have "changed case": if you prospect on https://pypi.org, you find SCons-4.7.0.tar.gz vs. scons-4.8.0.tar.gz, and the top-level unpacked directories the same: SCons-4.7.0 vs scons-4.8.0.