[Bug 520505] Spurious dependency on perl(Test::More)
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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=520505
--- Comment #8 from Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta(a)iki.fi> 2009-09-04 13:17:04 EDT ---
As said, it's been discussed before. Test suites often (usually?) contain
undocumented and bad API usage/coding examples; package size bloat; installing
stuff upstream hasn't intended to be installed; potential for spurious
dependency bloat (sorry that can't be left out as evidenced by this bug) - or
if you eliminate these deps, the tests can't be run without manually managing
them at which point it'd be better to download and use the source rpms for this
purpose (they have the proper deps, Makefile.PL's etc infrastructure upstream
intended for the test suite and have less risk of littering system locations
with generated test leftover data); kind of encourages bad practices such as
mentioned by Chris in his mail referred to in comment 2 (installing packages in
system locations and _then_ after the fact thinking about running test suites);
if upstream docs aren't good enough it'd be better to let upstream know about
that and ask them to improve things so more people would benefit; etc.
Yes, there are exceptions and _sometimes_ packaging the test suites or parts of
them might be beneficial. But I strongly think those cases are a rare
exception and it seems that test suites are packaged without much thought in
Fedora packages these days and FWIW I wouldn't personally consider approving
any package that doesn't document a good rationale for including that stuff in
the particular case of that package in question. If it was a good idea in
general, why wouldn't it be done in other packages besides perl ones, and why
isn't it done even in all perl packages, and why isn't there a general
guideline that encourages shipping that stuff in place or being pushed by
people, and all that already in place for lots and lots of years of packaging
history?
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