Message 81980 - Python tracker
I didn't mean to imply that automagic discovery based on external version control software is better than MANIFEST.in; I favor explicitness here as well. It's just that this information can (and often has to) be duplicated in setup.py as 'package_data' or 'data_files'. For cases that package_data/data_files are not enough, setup.py should be extended to handle them, instead of requiring to write and keep in sync a separate file with its own mini syntax.