sdist is missing tests

[mtelka]

The sdist package at PyPI is missing tests. Please add tests to sdist to make downstream testing easier. Thank you.

[ddelange]

why not fetch the tarball directly from the repository?

to quote python packaging veteran pfmoore:

I’m ambivalent over the matter of tests being included in sdists. My (personal) view is that I want the sdist so that I can build the project on an otherwise-unsupported environment, and I can view the source code of the project (even though pure Python wheels include the source, it’s not in “buildable form”). I don’t see supporting files like documentation sources, tests, release scripts, etc, as necessarily part of the sdist - if projects want to include them in the sdist, then that’s fine, but on the other hand, if they want to point users to a project repository for those things, I’m also fine with that. For my personal projects, I tend not to bundle these sorts of thing.

[mtelka]

Yes, I know that roughly half[*] of Python veterans prefers to not include tests in sdist. OTOH, there is another half of veterans who does, for example: pypa/setuptools#3051 (comment) (this link also contains a rationale why it is good to have tests in sdist). Also, please note that setuptools adds tests to sdist by default.

Yes, I can download the github tarball (and I actually do for cases like python-magic), but this is not the best possible option for various reasons. For example, because github tarballs are not stable.

[*] in this case "the half" is far less than 50% :-).

[ddelange]

Is the idea to also include the test assets?

[mtelka]

Is the idea to also include the test assets?

Very good question. If they are needed to run tests, then I'd say yes. But if they are big then adding them to sdist could be problematic. For example snowballstemmer moved their test data to a separate repo to solve that (they do have ca 90 MB of data).