I have recently noticed that there is a considerable number of dists which ship with MANIFEST.SKIP and so started to wonder why that might be.

The only use I can see for MANIFEST.SKIP is to rebuild MANIFEST and the only reason for that is to rebuild the dist for further distribution. That implies the dist having been altered in some way, otherwise the rebuild would be unnecessary.

If the dist has an open repository then I would expect anyone altering it to use that as their source (and MANIFEST.SKIP should happily live there). Contrarily if there's no public source then all a contributor has to work with is the shipped code. But in this case there are no other non-standard files to be avoided packaging, so again MANIFEST.SKIP is unnecessary.

Either I am missing something or there's no need to ship MANIFEST.SKIP at all. Probably it's the former. Do let me know.

In reply to Shipping MANIFEST.SKIP by hippo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.