dependency "path/to/file.hpp" won't be automatically included in the manifest: the path must be relative?

[AchimTuran]

Since our last setuptools update we see a message like the following:

dependency /path/to/header-file1.hpp won't be automatically included in the manifest: the path must be relative
dependency /path/to/header-file2.hpp won't be automatically included in the manifest: the path must be relative
dependency /path/to/header-file3.hpp won't be automatically included in the manifest: the path must be relative
....

It is a bit annoying in our ci logs. 😉

All listed files header files are dependencies from static libraries, which are used to build a C-Python extension with setuptools.
Looks like @RuRo introduced this message in Include Extension.depends in manifests and sdists by default - setuptools/command/build_ext.py#L284-L286.

Please also keep in mind we are using bdist_wheel tp create binary wheels.

I do have the following questions:

1. How can I suppress these messages?
2. Are those messages are only warnings?

[RuRo]

I think, I'll need more information on what exactly you are doing and what are you expecting to happen here.

This warning message is triggered during the sdist build (iirc, bdist_wheel still builds a sdist internally), when the Extension(depends=...) list has absolute paths. If these absolute paths are located inside your project root (e.g. /path/to/your/project/includes/header-file1.hpp), just change your setup.py so that these paths are relative to the project root (./includes/header-file1.hpp).

If these paths are actually absolute (e.g. /opt/cuda/include/something.h), then it's not clear, what are you expecting to happen here. You declare this file as a dependency for building your project, but there is no way to include this file in a source distribution. If somebody tries to use the source distribution of your project on a machine that doesn't have these files, the build will fail.

I think, there is no "one size fits all" way to fix this, but here are some options:

If you think, that these headers are guaranteed to be already present on all relevant machines or if you don't care about source distributions of your package (beyond the fact that they are used under the hood for bdist_wheel), then you can either a) ignore these warnings or b) remove these files from the depends list and instead add them via include_dirs or via -I options in extra_compile_args. My understanding is that depends and sources should be primarily used for in-project files, rather than external dependencies.

The other option would be to vendor these headers inside your project and then specify the paths to the vendored files, so that they ARE included in the sdist.

Let me know if you think that these options are not applicable to your use case. These warnings were mostly included to warn about unexpected situations, where the user is seemingly asking us to include absolute paths in the sdist/manifest.

Edit: minor correction, in the case of building bdist_wheel, the warning is caused by building the egg_info rather than sdist (this doesn't change much, because the .egg-info/SOURCES.txt file still contains the manifest for the source distribution, so the end problem is still essentially the same).