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

["Germán A. Racca"]

On 04/30/2012 11:54 AM, 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.
>
> -J
>>
>> Ralf
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> packaging mailing list
>> packaging at lists.fedoraproject.org
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging

Finally, I have decided to run the tests in the spec file:

%check
%{__python} setup.py test

and to put the file runtests.py and tests/ directory in %doc because it 
doesn't take much space and the user that decided to dig into the 
package, can find the tests useful in some way.

Thanks to all that participated in this thread.

All the best,
Germán.

-- 
Germán A. Racca
Fedora Package Maintainer
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Skytux