Better CI for checking the files.

[xiki-tempula]

I don't know what is the solution to this but it can be the case that people forget to change the MANIFEST.in to include the corresponding files.

This would not raise any problem if one were to check out the branch and install it, which is what the current CI is doing.

However, it would be a problem if one were to install it with https://github.com/alchemistry/alchemtest/archive/master.zip, where the files not in the MANIFEST.in would not be included in the master.zip, which I don't know how to make the CI check this.

[orbeckst]

Missing entries in MANIFEST.in break the distribution files, namely the packages on pypi!

For a start we can add an entry that builds the package

python setup.py sdist

then checks with twine check; we do something like that in MDAnalysis and a few other repos — the MDA example is https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/blob/9b37cd676f22bea14e715ade32b0714f1057a553/.github/workflows/gh-ci.yaml#L343-L348

This check would likely not notice missing entries in MANIFEST.in, though. But one could then install the dist file in a virtualenv and run a test there.

[richardjgowers]

The latter half of @orbeckst 's comment is what we do for MDA and it often catches mistakes in MANIFEST around new files

[orbeckst]

@richardjgowers @IAlibay where in the MDA CI do we install the source package (or wheel) in a virtual env and then run tests to check that we can install it?

[IAlibay]

@richardjgowers @IAlibay where in the MDA CI do we install the source package (or wheel) in a virtual env and then run tests to check that we can install it?

Sorry I'm coming in here blind, do you mean on deployment or during CI?

[orbeckst]

During CI — at least how I read @richardjgowers ' comment #62 (comment). But maybe it was part of the deployment workflow.

[richardjgowers]

Ah right I (used to) do it manually as part of the release process. As a CI step it would be to do a sdist then install from the resulting tarball and do some tests

[IAlibay]

tbh it's in our CD pipeline, you could just run that bit as part of CI (indeed we sorta would if we hadn't turned it off because it's a lot to run).

I'm assuming here what you need is just "use pipx to create wheels and tarball" "install from tarball / wheel and run CI"?

It's not major amounts of work to implement.