Setuptools has many silent failure modes. One of them is failure to include all files in sdist release (well not exactly a failure, you could RTFM, but the default behavior is unexpected). This post will serve as a google-yourself-answer for this problem, until we get new, shinier, Distribute solving all of our problems.
I b0rked the release for plonetheme.twinapex. Version 1.0 package didn’t include media assets and ZCML configuration files. Luckily Python community reacted quickly and I got advised how to fix it.
By default, setuptools include only *.py files. You need to explicitly declare support for other filetypes in MANIFEST.in file.
Example MANIFEST.in (plonetheme, built in PyDev):
recursive-include plonetheme * recursive-include docs * global-exclude *pyc global-exclude .project global-exclude .pydevproject
About the author Mikko Ohtamaa