Difference between prune and recursive-exclude in setuptools?

Question

I am using setuptools to package a custom module for deployment, which should not include certain files in the data/ directory that were used for development. I have succesfully excluded the necessary files using recursive-exclude data/ * in my MANIFEST.in file, but I also see that I could do this via prune data/

Both approaches remove the intended files from package.egg-info/SOURCES.txt after packaging via python setup.py egg_info

Is there any difference between the two?

Answer 1

Based on the documentation behaviour is:

• recursive-exclude dir pat1 pat2 takes the directory dir and ignores all the files that match patterns pat1 and pat2

• prune dir will exclude all files within the directory dir

So in your case recursive-exclude dir * and prune dir should have the same behaviour, except that prune will remove the whole directory, whereas recursive-exclude will preserve an empty folder.