Custom archives can be created by providing a function named "dist" in the top-level script file. The following example prints a checksum immediately after the archive is created:

VERSION = '0.0.1'
APPNAME = 'cpp_test'

def dist():
    import md5
    from Scripting import dist
    (f, filename) = dist(APPNAME, VERSION)
    f = file(filename,'rb')
    m = md5.md5()
    readBytes = 100000
    while (readBytes):
        readString = f.read(readBytes)
        m.update(readString)
        readBytes = len(readString)
    f.close()
    print(filename, m.hexdigest())
    sys.exit(0)
			

A function may be defined for excluding or adding more files to the archive. The hook is executed from the temporary directory after the dist function has finished to run:

def dist_hook():
	os.remove('foo.txt')
			

When copying the files, the dist function automatically excludes temporary files. The function dont_dist in the module Scripting does the filtering, the code is reproduced below:

excludes = '.svn CVS .arch-ids {arch} SCCS BitKeeper .hg'.split()
dist_exts = '~ .rej .orig .pyc .pyo .bak config.log .tar.bz2 .zip Makefile Makefile.in'.split()
def dont_dist(name, src, build_dir):
    global excludes, dist_exts

    if (name.startswith(',,')
        or name.startswith('++')
        or (src == '.' and name == Options.lockfile)
        or name in excludes
        or name == build_dir
        ):
        return True

    for ext in dist_exts:
        if name.endswith(ext):
            return True

    return False
			

To exclude new files, it is possible to modify the extensions, or to provide a new method dont_dist, for example, to disable most of the filtering:

import Scripting
def dont_dist(name, src, build_dir):
	if (name == build_dir or (src == '.' and name == Options.lockfile)):
		return True
	return False