As I understand it, a MANIFEST.in directive:

    recursive-include foo bar.*

is meant to match files under foo for with names beginning with "bar.".
However, the actual regex that is generated for this line is:

    r'^foo/.*bar\.[^/]*\Z(?ms)'

which matches any filename under foo that contains "bar." anywhere in the
base filename. For example, if foo contains files bar.py and test_bar.py,
then the pattern will match both filenames. Is this the intended
behaviour? I would have expected it to only match bar.py.

If the desired behavior is what I expected (and not how it currently
works), then the desired regex is:

    r'^foo/(.*/)?bar\.[^/]*\Z(?ms)'

The attached patch (against 2.7) implements this change. It is dependent
on the fix for issue 6884. I have tested it on both Linux and Windows.

Thanks, will look into it.

For the record, this is still a bug in Python 3.8 distutils (and it affects global-(include|exclude) as well), but it's been fixed in setuptools, so it shouldn't affect people writing MANIFEST.in files in 2020.

Distutils is now deprecated (see PEP 632) and all tagged issues are being closed. From now until removal, only release blocking issues will be considered for distutils.

If this issue does not relate to distutils, please remove the component and reopen it. If you believe it still requires a fix, most likely the issue should be re-reported at https://github.com/pypa/setuptools