Note that the upstream tarball name has changed from ...tar.gz to ...tar.xz. It was a good suggestion to use xz, as the new tarball's size is only about 54% of the old.
I hope the packaging is now cleaner, thanks to using MANIFEST.in. I took the liberty to use SPKG.txt as README file in the Python part of the package (python setup.py sdist
expects some kind of README). Hope that's OK.
I checked that the package installs fine and correctly builds the docs. In particular, the checksum provided in the latest commit should be fine.