Most of MANIFEST.in is obsolete, get rid of it

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

Fom pypa /setuptools_scm:

Additionally setuptools_scm provides setuptools with a list of files that are managed by the SCM (i.e. it automatically adds all of the SCM-managed files to the sdist). Unwanted files must be excluded by discarding them via MANIFEST.in.

[larsoner]

It seems like we should still check-manifest, no? For example once we merge #2595 then having bin/codespell in MANIFEST.in seems like an error that we should catch

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

As far as I can see, check-manifest is not setuptools_scm-aware, it insists files such as COPYING are added to MANIFEST.in:

$ check-manifest --no-build-isolation
lists of files in version control and sdist do not match!
missing from VCS:
  codespell_lib/_version.py
missing from sdist:
  COPYING
suggested MANIFEST.in rules:
  include COPYING
$ 

[larsoner]

If there are things to ignore, we should be able to add them to the --ignore I think, e.g.,

https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/blob/8f01c9002a8ec6d89824e0cc1c6415be73ab1987/Makefile#L120

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

I'm not sure what check-manifest is supposed to check now that all files in the VCS are implicitly and automatically included. What is left to check?

MNE-Python is a poor example, it does not use setuptools_scm.

[larsoner]

I'm not sure what check-manifest is supposed to check now that all files in the VCS are implicitly and automatically included. What is left to check?

If this is the case, shouldn't this PR rm MANIFEST.in entirely rather than just remove some of its lines?

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

MANIFEST.in is still useful to exclude files, but not to include files:

Additionally setuptools_scm provides setuptools with a list of files that are managed by the SCM (i.e. it automatically adds all of the SCM-managed files to the sdist). Unwanted files must be excluded by discarding them via MANIFEST.in.

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

By the way, the failing tests seem unrelated to this merge request. They appear to be caused by #2626, which added python -m build without adding build as dependency to pyproject.toml.

[larsoner]

Okay, feel free to add build to the dev deps here