title: Excluding a top-level directory from a setuptools package
body: <p>I'm trying to put a Python project into a tarball using setuptools.  The problem is that setuptools doesn't appear to like the way that the source tree was originally setup (not by me, I must add).  Everything that I actually want to distribute is in the top-level directory, rather than in a subdirectory like the setuptools docs talk about.</p>
  
  <p>The tree has a directory, <code>tests</code>, that I don't want to have in the released package.  However, using <code>exclude_package_data</code> doesn't seem to actually do any excluding, and I'd like to work out what I've done wrong.</p>
  
  <p>My <code>setup.py</code> looks like this, in relevant part:</p>
  
  <pre><code>setup(
    name="project",
    packages=[''],
    include_package_data=True,
    exclude_package_data={'': ['tests']},
    test_suite='nose.collector',
  )
  </code></pre>