I didn't mean to imply that automagic discovery based on external
version control software is better than MANIFEST.in; I favor
explicitness here as well. It's just that this information can (and
often has to) be duplicated in setup.py as 'package_data' or
'data_files'. For cases that package_data/data_files are not enough,
setup.py should be extended to handle them, instead of requiring to
write and keep in sync a separate file with its own mini syntax.