How the contents of the DESCRIPTION.rst in python wheel are generated?

Question

When I generate wheel for my python package with command python setup.py bdist_wheel I get a whl file DESCRIPTION.rst with only UNKNOWN string inside. How can I fill DESCRIPTION.rst with information that I want to?

Answer 1

DESCRIPTION.rst contains whatever you passed to the long_description argument of setup() in your setup.py. This argument is intended to be used for supplying your package's README, and most packages set it with the equivalent of long_description=open('README.rst').read().