Best practice: exclude generated ‘foo.egg-info’ files from source and VCS (was: Best practice: .egg-info with pybuild from git)

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Piotr Ożarowski <piotr@debian.org> writes:

> I think Mathias is asking about how to tell git that it should ignore
> these files as well. IMO you should ask upstream to not ship these
> files in git repo/tarballs or remove them in the first commit after
> each merge with upstream.

Yes, the best course is to convince upstream to ship proper source
tarballs, instead of bundling generated non-source files in the source
tarball.

In the long term, the solution includes educating upstream not to put
non-source files like the ‘foo.egg-info’ directory into the VCS. Files
that need to be generated should be generated when creating the release
tarballs, not tracked in VCS.

That may entail users of a hosting service to convince the provider to
improve tools for automatically generating the source tarballs. That's a
matter for those users and the provider to work out – and <rant>is a
good reason not to have everyone on e.g. GitHub, for example, so there
can be meaningful competition between hosting providers</rant>.

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Ben Finney