The changed behavior of sdist in 2.7 broke packaging for projects that
wanted to use a manually-maintained MANIFEST file (instead of having a
MANIFEST.in template and letting distutils generate the MANIFEST).

The fixes that were committed for #8688 (d29399100973 by Tarek and
f7639dcdffc3 by me) did not fix all issues exposed in the bug report,
and also added one problem: the MANIFEST file format gained comments,
but the read_manifest method was not updated to handle (i.e. ignore)
them.  This changeset should fix everything; the tests have been
expanded and I successfully tested with Mercurial, which suffered from
this regression.

I have grouped the versionchanged directives for these bugs in one place
and added micro version numbers to help users know the quirks of the
exact version they’re using.  I also removed a stanza in the docs that
was forgotten in Tarek’s first changeset.

Initial report, thorough diagnosis and patch by John Dennis, further
work on the patch by Stephen Thorne, and a few edits and additions by
me.