Should sdists include docs and tests?

[brettcannon]

@abravalheri

I have the impression that currently there is no tooling that will allow easily running the tests from the sdist right?

Does it mean that even when the developers distribute their tests, the fact that the tests themselves work is purely accidental, because the majority of people is not running the tests from the sdist ?

It’s not necessarily accidental, but more about researching as to how to run the tests. So things like RPM I believe let you specify how to run the test suite, so whomever repackages the Python project has to look that up.

@pf_moore

What baffles me about this statement is the presumption that the only thing downstream needs is the list of dependencies. Even with those extras, they still have to look at the config to see what exact command to use to run the tests, what options need to be passed to that command, any environment settings needed (env variables, run from a particular working directory, etc) and so on.

I view it as a 3-step process:

1. Get the test code included in the sdists (the whole point of this topic; the “where”)
2. Be able to specify what the tests must have installed (which came up in this discussion as getting people to specify a test extra)
3. Be able to specify how to run the tests (this has not been discussed and is a separate topic)

I’m not sure if people view steps 1-2 not useful w/o 3, or if step 3 is a separate thing but isn’t useful w/o steps 1-2.