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!