[Fedora-packaging] should I include tests in the package?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 05:12:43PM +0200, Thomas Spura wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Jon Ciesla <limburgher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 8:56 AM, Jon Ciesla <limburgher at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 8:50 AM, "Germán A. Racca"
> >> <german.racca at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Hi list:
> >>>
> >>> I'm the packager of APLpy: http://aplpy.github.com/
> >>>
> >>> I'm going to update it to a new version, which comes with a set of tests,
> >>> but I'm not sure about what to do with them. I asked upstream and the answer
> >>> is:
> >>>
> >>> "The tests are there for us to diagnose any issues related to specific
> >>> dependency versions and platforms, and to make sure that we don't
> >>> break anything when making changes. It would be useful if you include
> >>> them so that we can ask users to run them if they are having issues we
> >>> can't reproduce, but you don't need to run the tests as part of the
> >>> build/setup."
> >>>
> >>> I'm still not sure. Should I include them in the package?
> >>
> >> Unless they impose huge build deps or something, run them in make check.
> >
> > To more directly answer your question, yes, include and run tests
> > whenever possible. :)
> 
> This sounds like a SHOULD: include tests whenever possible...
> 
> It's enough to run it in %check and normally a user of the package
> doesn't need to have the tests around.
> I'd only include them, when upstream wants to have tham in and
> installs them with "make" or "setup.py". And only in the latter case,
> you need to decide to split the tests into a subpackage.
> 
Indeed:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Test_Suites

Whether to ship the tests for the end user is a more complicated problem
because test suites aren't terribly standardised and so different upstream
test suites may have various issues.

For instance, the APLpy runtests.py script has a chunk of encoded text at
the start.  From the code that operates on it, I'm guessing that it's
a pickled compiled code block of a bundled library (python-py).  That's
something we'd hesitate to run in the buildsys let alone on user's machines.

-Toshio
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