Instead of having the long description of a Python egg hardcoded in the setup.py file, it is possible (and cleaner) to ask setuptools to open the README.txt file of the package while generating the egg informations (*).

One advantage is that the README file will be used as the main content of the project page on cheeseshop. It makes it easier to keep a well formatted documentation that doesn't require to download the full package (then tarball expand, then open README.txt…) for being accessible/readable.

In the setup.py config file, use the following code (in this case, for a theme for Plone):

from setuptools import setup, find_packages

version = '0.1'

setup(name='plonetheme.mytheme',
      version=version,
      description="An installable theme for Plone 3.0",
      long_description = open("README.txt").read(),
      # Get more strings from http://www.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=list_classifiers
      classifiers=[
        "Framework :: Plone",
        "Framework :: CMF",
        "Framework :: Zope2",
        "Programming Language :: Python",
        "Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python Modules",
        ],
      keywords='web zope plone theme',
      author='Plone Collective',
      author_email='product-developers@lists.plone.org',
      url='https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/plonetheme.mytheme',
      license='GPL',
      packages=find_packages(exclude=['ez_setup']),
      namespace_packages=['plonetheme'],
      include_package_data=True,
      zip_safe=False,
      install_requires=[
          'setuptools',
          # -*- Extra requirements: -*-
      ],
      entry_points="""
      # -*- Entry points: -*-
      """,
      )