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

[Paul Moore]

On 6 October 2015 at 14:51, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Of course, the same argument can be made for installing tests, since it's
>> not
>> very common.
>
>
> So we can actually get some data here :)
>
> At Enthought, we support around 400 packages. More than half of them are
> python packages, and we can make the reasonable assumption than the vast
> majority of those packages are fairly popular.
>
> More precisely, if I install all our supported packages on Linux:
>  - I count ~ 308 packages by making the assumption that one directory in
> site-packages is a package (wrong but decent approximation)
>  - I count as `with tests` a package with at least one directory called test
> in say package
>
> With those assumptions, I count 46 % packages with tests installed. So it is
> not "not very common". Granted, we are biased toward scientific packages
> which to include tests in the package, but we also package popular
> web/etc... packages.

Interesting. Prompted by this, I did a check on my Python 3.4
installation. 84 packages, of which 21 have a "tests" subdirectory
containing __init__.py and 4 have a "test" subdirectory containing
__init__.py. That's 25%, which is certainly higher than I would have
guessed. Of course, the implication is that 75% (or 54% in David's
case) use test suites *not* installed with the package :-)

But I think it's fair to say that installing the tests with the
package is a common enough model, and it clearly does have some
benefits.

To answer the OP's question, I stand by my original impression, which
is that "it depends" :-)

I don't want the sample project to *not* include tests, so as far as
that is concerned, I'm going with "the status quo wins there" and
suggesting there's no reason to change.

Paul