check-manifest no longer finds files in sdist but not in VCS

[mgedmin]

A while ago I changed check-manifest to build a source distribution in a temporary directory, to avoid setuptools plugins from butting in and overriding MANIFEST.in (issue #1). The temporary directory gets a copy of all the source files from the VCS (plus MANIFEST.in, even if it's not in the VCS -- since that's what we're checking).

Unfortunately as a result you can no longer discover that your MANIFEST.in includes files that aren't present in the version control system -- they can't possibly be included during the test since they're not copied to the temporary directory.

I'm afraid this means check-manifest will need to build the sdist twice: once in the temporary directory, and once directly in the source tree.

I'm also toying with an alternative, simpler option, of having check-manifest --inplace skip the copying step.

[mgedmin]

Suppose I have three sets of files:

• source_files (extracted from the VCS),
• sdist_files (produced by running setup.py sdist in the source tree, where setuptools might make use of VCS data or an old .egg-info/SOURCES.txt)
• clean_sdist_files (produced by running setup.py sdist in a temp directory that contains only a copy of source_files plus MANIFEST.in).

I need to draw a Venn diagram of the three sets and figure out what it all means.

[mgedmin]

(I'm blocked by not having paper and pencils at home, and by being busy at work.)

[mgedmin]

Areas:

1. missing from MANIFEST.in
2. missing from VCS (not really possible to have files there, except maybe MANIFEST.in if it somehow gets excluded from the "dirty" sdist)
3. missing from VCS
4. missing from VCS (the only file that can be here is MANIFEST.in itself)
5. missing from MANIFEST.in
6. is it even possible? I don't think so
7. all good

[mgedmin]

So,

missing from MANIFEST.in = 1 and 5 = source_files - clean_sdist_files
missing from VCS = 2 and 3 and 4 = (sdist_files | clean_sdist_files) - source_files

It may be also interesting to compute 6 just to see if it is non-empty, because I don't think that's possible: (clean_sdist_files & source_files) - sdist_files.

[mgedmin]

This will be fixed in version 0.20, out later today.

(I wish to fix #28 before making a release.)