Just today I needed to remove files from a package. And I realised that I forgot to mention that removing files from the MANIFEST.in files has a small gotcha… Here’s the small note I added to the original article:

When running the setup script, it will create a folder with the extension .egg-info. If you make changes to your MANIFEST.in file, you should delete this folder. It contains a file named SOURCES.txt which contains all the file in the package. If you remove files from your manifest, the will only disappear when that file is changes as well. So the easiest way is to delete the egg-info folder and let the setup script re-create it!

Following some of the comments, the previous article about python packaging has been updated.

• Added a note about pip install -e as an alternative to python setup.py develop
• Added a note about testpypi.python.org
• Fixed the section about the manifest (I forgot to add include_package_data to the setup script)

One of the really useful things in python are the setup scripts. When doing “serious” business, you really should look into them. Setup scripts are amazingly powerful. But they don’t necessarily need to be complex. But because of this flexibility, the documentation around them seems like a lot to read. Additionally, the state of packaging has changed quite a bit over the years. So you now have a couple of packages (distutils, setuptools, distribute) which all seem to try to solve the same problem. See the current state of packaging for more details on this.

This post attempts to summarize the important bits using a “Hello World” project and steeping through the process of creating the setup.py file:

• Creating a package distribution
• Automatic generation of executables
• Version numbers
• Dependency management
• Publishing your package (thus also making it available for automatic dependency resolution)
• Some more food for thought.

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Are you using git/svn/mercurial/bazaar as version control system and you ever wanted to visualize your work, how the project developed over time well Gource is there to visualize all this in a beautiful way. It takes the history of your svn/git/mercurial/bazaar repository and visualizes the changes over time, by whom they were done and so forth.

Now run the following with path/to/project being your projects root directory, and give gource the .git subfolder. Run it and you should see the animation being presented.

Now to export this to an mpeg4 video do the following.

Here an example I created from one of my projects.