[TIP] Guidelines for where to put tests & how to package them

[Carl Meyer]

Olemis Lang wrote:
>> if the author wants the tests installed and
>> available. Titus' suggestion meets this requirement; anything involving
>> setup.py does not.
>>
> 
> Q:
>   - This implies command line switches or other similar mechanisms
>      to install with or without tests ?

At this point there's no metadata in the distutils2 conversation to
explicitly distinguish test packages and allow the installation tool to
provide such a command-line switch, which means it would be up to the
author, not the installer. Unless the "tests" naming standard was firm
enough to have an installer make decisions on that basis.

System packagers might choose to split the tests into a
separately-installed OS package.

>   - `tests` package should be listed in `packages` ?

Yes, if the author wants them installed. At the sprints we talked about
the distutils2 static metadata having a recursive-by-default `packages`
setting (with an `exclude_packages` override), so it's less hassle to
include sub-packages.

Carl