These files are created by some NFS clients a file is edited and removed
concurrently (see added link in doc for more info). If such a file is
removed between distutils calls listdir and copy, it will get confused.
Other special files are ignored in sdist (namely VCS directories), but
this has to be filtered out earlier.
Requested by Florent Xicluna with the rationale that they make the docs
look unfinished. I’ve also removed a few XXX notes that were not
visible in the HTML but could waste contributors’ time by suggesting
improvements that are never going to happen for distutils.
The changed behavior of sdist in 3.1 broke packaging for projects that
wanted to use a manually-maintained MANIFEST file (instead of having a
MANIFEST.in template and letting distutils generate the MANIFEST).
The fixes that were committed for #8688 (76643c286b9f by Tarek and
d54da9248ed9 by me) did not fix all issues exposed in the bug report,
and also added one problem: the MANIFEST file format gained comments,
but the read_manifest method was not updated to handle (i.e. ignore)
them. This changeset should fix everything; the tests have been
expanded and I successfully tested the 2.7 version with Mercurial, which
suffered from this regression.
I have grouped the versionchanged directives for these bugs in one place
and added micro version numbers to help users know the quirks of the
exact version they’re using.
Initial report, thorough diagnosis and patch by John Dennis, further
work on the patch by Stephen Thorne, and a few edits and additions by
me.
