MANIFEST.in ignored on "python setup.py install" - no data files installed?

Question

Here's my stripped-down setup.py script with non-code stuff removed:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from distutils.core import setup
from whyteboard.misc import meta


setup(
    name = 'Whyteboard',
    version = meta.version,

    packages = ['whyteboard', 'whyteboard.gui', 'whyteboard.lib', 'whyteboard.lib.pubsub',
                'whyteboard.lib.pubsub.core', 'whyteboard.lib.pubsub.utils', 'whyteboard.misc'],

    py_modules = ['whyteboard'],
    scripts = ['whyteboard.py'],
)

MANIFEST.in:

include *.txt
include whyteboard-help/*.*
recursive-include locale *.mo
recursive-include images *.png

When I run "python setup.py install sdist" I get a nice .tar.gz with a "whyteboard-0.41" root folder, with my locale/ images/ and whyteboard-help/ folders inside. This also has my whyteboard.py script that launches my program from inside the whyteboard source package.

So:

whyteboard/
 ├── locale/
 ├── images
 ├── whyteboard-help/
 ├── whyteboard/
 │  ├── __init__.py
 │  └── other packages etc
 ├── whyteboard.py
 ├── README
 ├── setup.py
 └── CHANGELOG

This mirrors the source of my program, is how everything should be, and is correct.

However when I run "python setup.py install" none of my data files are written - only the "whyteboard" source package, and the whyteboard.py is placed in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/.

Ideally, I'd like the same directory structure as what's been generated in the .tar.gz file to be created in dist-packages, as this is how my program expects to look for its resources.

How can I get "install" to create this directory structure? It seems to be ignoring my manifest file, as far as I can tell.

Answer 1

MANIFEST.in tells Distutils what files to include in the source distribution but it does not directly affect what files are installed. For that you need to include the appropriate files in the setup.py file, generally either as package data or as additional files.