[TIP] including (or not) tests within your package

[Olemis Lang]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Jul 28, 2010, at 07:49 AM, Olemis Lang wrote:
>
>>>> +1 for including the tests by default.
>>>
>>> Agreed 100x with Barry -
>>
>>IMO, tests shouldn't be installed in production systems ...
>
> It's certainly within the decisions of platform packagers to separate tests
> from the code, but I'd argue that it's not worth it.  I just don't see what
> advantage *not* including the tests gives you.

  - Nobody (human, software, ...) is gonna execute *accidentally* the tests
    in a production server (e.g. running server will not wait until
finishing the
    3h test run to acquire global lock or connection ...)
  - Space is preserved . That's something important if talking about
    using the package in constrained environments (e.g. limited devices,
    shared hosting, ...) . This also makes me recall decisions like
    splitting stdlib in order to build custom (as small as possible,
    yet functional) installers for Python itself.
  - Python test suite is *optionally* installed -at least in Windows-,
isn't it ?
    So it seems it's worth it for all packages in stdlib under certain
    conditions .
  - It's always possible to install the test package at any time and do
    whatever with it , as well as remove it later.

> And arguably it can make for
> more complicated packaging,
>

Yes definitely , but I'd say complex (since «complex is better than
complicated» ;o)

> Sure, there are exceptions, and big frameworks/packages might want to do
> things differently.  But I'd argue that the *majority* of Python packages are
> fairly simple and straightforward and it's better (and easier!) to just
> include the tests.
>

Well, «practicality (will always) beat purity» (and that's why I first
mentioned that I'd like to do something like this , but currently I
don't 'cause, in practice, I've not had the time to think about how to
do it «perfect» & easy ;o) .

PS: I understand that probably there's not a universal solution for
all kind of packages .

-- 
Regards,

Olemis.

Blog ES: http://simelo-es.blogspot.com/
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