When I upload modules to PyPI, distutils is clucking about a missing README, even though PyPI accepts README.rst, and I am providing that.

Registering pyplay to http://pypi.python.org/pypi
Server response (200): OK
python setup.py sdist upload
running sdist
warning: sdist: standard file not found: should have one of README, README.txt

If it’s only a warning, just ignore it.  This would be easy to fix, but as it would be considered a new feature, it can’t go into distutils, which is frozen.  I am however willing to edit the documentation to tell that PyPI will accept README.rst and that people need not worry about the unfortunate warning.  Would that be okay with you?

In distutils2, the replacement for distutils, we don’t included README by default.  I don’t know why this was changed.

Just wanted to note that this confuses other people too...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4384796/readme-extension-for-python-projects

Is this something that could be changed in 'distribute'?

distribute is not a project of python-dev, please use their bug tracker.

For distutils, I explained why we can’t change it and proposed a doc change; nobody commented on that.

For distutils2, I’m waiting for a reply from Tarek to this question: why don’t we include README by default anymore?

> When I upload modules to PyPI, distutils is clucking about a missing
> README, even though PyPI accepts README.rst, and I am providing that.
PyPI doesn’t do anything with README, it displays the value of long_description.

> warning: sdist: standard file not found: should have one of README, README.txt
Is it a problem to name your reST file README.txt?


In packaging/distutils2, the recommended idiom looks like this (in setup.cfg):

    [metadata]
    description-file = README.whatever

sdist will include that file.  You can also write the description in the setup.cfg directly and have your README file included with the extra_files field.


This can’t be changed in distutils and works differently without warning in distutils2; closing.

FWIW, I opened a PR for this: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/563

New changeset f9f87f0934ca570293ba7194bed3448a7f9bf39c by Victor Stinner (Ryan Gonzalez) in branch 'master':
bpo-11913: Add README.rst to the distutils standard READMEs list (#563)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/f9f87f0934ca570293ba7194bed3448a7f9bf39c

PR 563 has been merged.