5.2 Manifest-related options

The normal course of operations for the sdist command is as follows:

if the manifest file, MANIFEST doesn't exist, read MANIFEST.in and create the manifest
if either MANIFEST.in or the setup script (setup.py) are more recent than MANIFEST, recreate MANIFEST by reading MANIFEST.in
use the list of files now in MANIFEST (either just generated or read in) to create the source distribution archive(s)

There are a couple of options that modify this behaviour.

First, you might want to force the manifest to be regenerated--for example, if you have added or removed files or directories that match an existing pattern in the manifest template, you should regenerate the manifest:

python setup.py sdist --force-manifest

Or, you might just want to (re)generate the manifest, but not create a source distribution:

python setup.py sdist --manifest-only

(--manifest-only implies --force-manifest.)

If you don't want to use the default file set, you can supply the --no-defaults option. If you use --no-defaults and don't supply a manifest template (or it's empty, or nothing matches the patterns in it), then your source distribution will be empty.

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