document file listing behaviour more comprehensible

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

trafficstars

the small mention of file listers doesn't help people unaware of the setuptools feature to even grasp its importance or use it as intended

more detailed explanations and examples are needed

[antocuni]

Also, from the point of view of someone who writes setup.py but it's not particularly aware of all the distutils/setuptools quirks, it is a bit unclear what is the relationship of setuptools_scm w.r.t. package_data, include_package_data and MANIFEST.in

[gaborbernat]

so can someone explain? :+1: from what I see setuptools_scm forces everything to be packaged, which would make package_data redundant

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

@gaborbernat bascially setuptools_scm also registers a file lister for git/hg, thus adding all files to the sdists

[gaborbernat]

yeah, I saw that reading through the code, I see how some people probably really on that, but it completely messes up people using the canonical find_packages, and package_data mechanism - maybe that setuptools file lister should be opt out able! thanks :+1:

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

@gaborbernat due to setuptools limitations its impossible to easily opt out as its an api thats kept completely distinct

i'm willing to accept a clean implementation of a sane opt out, i'm not going to invent one and i'm going to reject messy ones

[jaraco]

In the past, setuptools had Subversion support built-in. If you had a subversion repo, it presumed you wanted to use the repo to manage your package contents. Setuptools_scm builds on this assumption, but around git and hg.

But you bring up a good point - that you may want the versioning support but want to disregard the file finder support.

In my opinion, the file finder support is superior and should be preferred if available, but I'm not yet convinced that there's a case where the presence of a file finder is undesirable.

If there is such a case that can be made, it's probably in Setuptools that the functionality should be added so that it can apply to other file finders (setuptools_svn, future SCMs, or alternates).

[gaborbernat]

@jaraco I agree, looking at the bits and codes, the setuptools exclude should apply to SCM code and not taken blindly 👍 on the other hand it's interesting how should file finders interact with find_packages and data_files settings.