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

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 04/30/2012 04:54 PM, Jon Ciesla wrote:
> 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.

This also is not safe. Probably all perl-package packagers have their 
own story on installing testsuites as %doc.

Background: rpm and the rpm perl module deptracker repeatedly have 
accidentally pulled in deps on certain kind of files in %doc. (I don't 
know, if these issues are terminally resolved in all active versions of 
Fedora and RHEL).

This experience has caused me to generally avoid packaging non-doc files 
in %doc ;)

Ralf