Package data

In most cases you probably won't have to include the package data, but in the cases where you do need data to go with your package, there are a few different options. First, it is important to know which files are included in your package by default:

• Python source files in the package directories recursively
• The setup.py and setup.cfg files
• Tests: test/test*.py
• All *.txt and *.py files in the examples directory
• All *.txt files in the root directory

So after the defaults, we have the first solution: the package_data argument to the setup function. The syntax for that is simple enough, a dictionary where the keys are the packages and the values are the patterns to include:

package_data = {
    'docs': ['*.rst'],
}

The second solution is using a MANIFEST.in file. This file contains patterns to include, exclude, and more. The include and exclude commands use patterns to match. These patterns are glob-style patterns (see the glob module for documentation: https...