MANIFEST.in not honoured during install phase   The python package setup procedure appears to be a mess, you have setuptools, distutils, and distribute (distutils2?). All I set out to do was to fix the installation setup.py  in django-simplemenu  package which was omitting the non-python module plain locale  directory but instead got myself involved a 3 hour roller coaster; I am sharing my findings in hopes of helping you, so if you are reading this do +1  this.   Including sub directories and non python files as part of package   There are two ways: MANIFEST.in  file and package_data  setup.py option. The latter is Pythonic but doesn’t do recursive includes - so you would have to list every sub directory - and can not include files in the root top most folder; sure once could write a python function to do this but why the complexity? MANIFEST.in with its file/directory pattern matching and with the setup.py's ``include_package_data`` option fits the bill:    ``include_package_data...