And yet reality is that many downstreams can't rely on an sdist to include that because it is an installable format. Not everything does include those files. I tend to view an sdist as a similar format to wheels. I've been bullied into including the tests and docs on occasion, but that has never actually provided benefit to more than a handful of folks. It seems silly that we're not also considering the portions of the world with terrible internet when making this decision. Giant sdists make their lives orders of magnitude worse for the benefit of maybe 20-30 people who tend to use the tests.

Sent from my phone with my typo-happy thumbs. Please excuse my brevity

On Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 04:43 Freddy Rietdijk <freddyrietdijk@fridh.nl> wrote:
As a Nixpkgs Python maintainer I often ask projects to include their tests in the sdist so we can run them when packaging. I prefer it also when an sdist basically represents a snapshot of a repository.

On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 8:08 AM, Thomas Kluyver <thomas@kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 10, 2018, at 12:33 AM, Bert JW Regeer wrote:
Speaking as a maintainer of various different packages for the Pylons project, we include the following in our sdists:

- source code for the package
- tests for the package
- documentation for the package

and of course the license/history/changelog/everything you'd theoretically need to create a fork (minus .git). Our sdists are pretty big as a result.

When I was working out how Flit could build sdists without a MANIFEST.in, I settled on the idea that an sdist should be more or less a static equivalent of checking out the git tag for that release. So if a project lost its VCS history, all the files from release versions would still be in sdists. That means all the source files are there (like rst docs), but not generated files (like Sphinx HTML output).

Now that 'pip install' gets wheels where possible, there's less pressure to make sdists as slim as possible, because far fewer people will need to wait for them to download.

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