Including files in Python package distributions

Including files in a distributed Python source requires manually specifying them

See: "including files in source distributions with MANIFEST.in https://packaging.python.org/guides/using-manifest-in/

There's some discussion here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24727709/do-python-projects-need-a-manifest-in-and-what-should-be-in-it

As demonstrated by Anthony Sottile in this video you can also use the package_data argument to setuptools.setup (or distutils.core.setup, equivalently)

Anthony doesn't mention that there's also setuptools_scm which will additionally handle incrementing your version number

The basic idea of setuptools_scm is that whichever files under version control will also be the files to be put into the source distribution (or "source control").

This makes sense to me, and I also like avoiding the need to increment the version number

There's a further discussion on this blog post which can be found linked on StackOverflow questions like this

setuptools_scm appears to have entered the spotlight around 4 or 5 years ago based on what I've seen on Twitter (I may be wrong)

There are also quite heated debates on Twitter among Python core/contributor developers, and reading it I'm inclined to agree with Paul Ganssle's conclusion that "the software is fine". (PEP 517 refers to the build tools requiring internet access among other details which I haven't fully followed)

• Pretty wild example of a setup.py using setuptools_scm: https://github.com/yeatmanlab/pyAFQ/blob/master/setup.py#L62 (again via Twitter)