[Distutils] Where should I put tests when packaging python modules?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2015 07:07:31 -0400
Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> I've never, in my entire life [...]

Can I suggest your entire life is an anecdotal data point here?

> This is still ignoring the problems of test dependencies

Only if your tests have dependencies that runtime doesn't have.

> as well so you'll
> still need to ask them to install some number of dependencies, and I think it's
> fairly trivial to ask someone to download a tarball, untar it, and run two
> commands.

Any number of things can be described as trivial depending on the
skillset and patience of the user.  When users report a bug, they are
not expecting to be asked to download and "untar" stuff.  Not every
user is a programmer.

> You're confusing "ships the test suite as part of the package" with "runs the
> test suite on the installed package". The two aren't really related, you can
> run the tests against an installed package trivially in either situation.

It's not trivial, because if you aren't careful you'll be running them
against the tarball / checkout instead (because of Python munging the
PYTHONPATH behind your back, for example), and this can go unnoticed for
a long time. By contrast, if you don't need a tarball / checkout to run
them, you can guarantee they are run against the installed location.

Regards

Antoine.