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

[Jon Ciesla]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On 04/30/2012 04:22 PM, "Germán A. Racca" wrote:
>>
>> On 04/30/2012 11:09 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>>
>>> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Germ=E1n_A=2E_Racca=22?=<german.racca at gmail.com>
>>> writes:
>>>>
>>>> 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 think you do want to make the tests available to users, but they don't
>>> necessarily have to be part of the base package.
>>> If the tests are large relative to the base package, a fairly common
>>> solution is to split them out into a sub-package, say aplpy-test.
>>>
>>> (This is in addition to running them during the build.)
>>>
>>> regards, tom lane
>>
>>
>> Hi Tom:
>>
>> $ du -sh aplpy/
>> 300K aplpy/
>>
>> $ du -sh tests/
>> 192K tests/
>>
>> So I think that a split is not needed in this case.
>
>
> This reasoning is dangerous:
>
> a) Testsuites usually pull in further dependencies, which are not required
> by the corresponding runtimes and therefore cause bloat.
>
> b) If everybody thinks the "These 100k more don't matter" way, the distro
> very soon will have problems.
>
>
> That said, my pragmatical recommendation would be
>
> a) Only explicitly package a testsuite, if upstream explicitly support this
> (I.e. if "make install" or similar install this testsuite). And if, do so in
> a separate package.
>
> b) Check carefully, if a test is actually designed to be externally (often
> this does not apply) or if it's an internal "self-testsuite".
>
> Apart of this, experience tells, *-test packages cause more trouble thany
> they use and often are removed in not too distant future.
>
Exactly, hence my suggestion to put it in %doc, to prevent deps,
though it doesn't help with disk space as much as leaving it out.

-J
>
> Ralf
>
>
>
>
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