Improve distribution package

[cdce8p]

• Explicitly include CHANGELOG and README.rst in the sdist. (LICENSE is already included through license.file.) https://flit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pyproject_toml.html#sdist-section
  This will not change that CHANGELOG and README.rst are not included in the wheel. (which is by design)
• Explicitly exclude any test files. Those should not be part of the distribution. Anyone who needs them should clone the repo instead.
• Use contents of README.rst for long description. Suggested here.
• Remove MANIFEST.in as it wasn't used to begin with.

Fixes: python/typing_extensions#18

[cdce8p]

FYI: Added a small note to the PR description regarding the wheel contents.

This will not change that CHANGELOG and README.rst are not included in the wheel. (which is by design)

LICENSE is separate and will be included in the wheel.

[JelleZijlstra]

Thanks!

@hegjon would you mind confirming whether this meets your needs as a redistributor?

[hegjon]

Yes, it is only the LICENSE file we are required to include. Other documentation like README and CHANGELOG will be included if the project have it. I noticed that README were no longer included, so I assumed it was unintetional.

I feel it is up to upstream if they want to ship the unit tests in the sdist. As a package maintainer, it would be nice to run the tests as part of the build. An example of how Fedora was able to detect issues early by running the included unit tests: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2049642

[hegjon]

As a side note, the tests are not included in the 3.7.4.3 version of RPM that is redistributed by Fedora:

$ rpm -ql python3-typing-extensions
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/__pycache__/typing_extensions.cpython-310.opt-1.pyc
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/__pycache__/typing_extensions.cpython-310.pyc
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions-3.7.4.3-py3.10.egg-info
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions-3.7.4.3-py3.10.egg-info/PKG-INFO
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions-3.7.4.3-py3.10.egg-info/SOURCES.txt
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions-3.7.4.3-py3.10.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions-3.7.4.3-py3.10.egg-info/requires.txt
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions-3.7.4.3-py3.10.egg-info/top_level.txt
/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/typing_extensions.py
/usr/share/doc/python3-typing-extensions
/usr/share/doc/python3-typing-extensions/README.rst
/usr/share/licenses/python3-typing-extensions
/usr/share/licenses/python3-typing-extensions/LICENSE

[dlax]

Debian also runs tests during package build. That's a fairly common practice and this usually relies on the test suite being available in sdist.

[cdce8p]

I feel it is up to upstream if they want to ship the unit tests in the sdist.

I had seen this tweet recently about how including "unnecessary" data inside distribution packages can add up quickly. That's why I usually choose to exclude them. For my personal projects, I even go as far as to only include license files in addition to the actual package.

[JelleZijlstra]

I have no opinion on whether tests should be in the sdist; I'd like to just follow whatever recommendation the packaging folks come up with.

[cdce8p]

Thinking about it some more, I would guess most users will download the wheel not sdist. So all in all, it might not matter too much. Let's include include it, it's only one more file after all.