[racket-dev] should package "X" imply package "X-test"?

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Wed Oct 16 11:30:27 EDT 2013

I'm speaking of third-party packages only; I don't know about the 
packages that make up core Racket.  (But perhaps whatever is done for 
any special needs of core Racket can avoid complicating things for 
third-party packages.)

For third-party packages, for the audience of technical users of Racket, 
I think that getting documentation, source code, and tests by default is 
a good thing.  Not only do technical users often want those things, but 
IMHO we should be encouraging people to use those things.  This could be 
the simple case.

For use or installation of third-party packages on very small devices, 
such as on an OpenWRT router, or for packaging shrinkwrap apps, maybe 
there should be a directive in "info.rkt" for what files can be excluded 
in ``tiny'' installations, in addition to not including docs.  This 
seems like an unusual case, but seems like there is a simple solution, 
while also keeping the usual case simple.

For third-party package authors who want to avoid some big dependency in 
the tests (e.g., huge data set, or dependencies on some other packages), 
maybe the solution is the same as ``tiny'' above, maybe they need to 
separate out some of their tests into a separate package, or maybe the 
dependency is not all that necessary.  This too seems like an unusual 
case to me, although I do have one package myself that kinda runs into 
it (non-small test files in 
"http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-mediafile/").  Again, it seems to me 
like the solution for this unusual case is simple and keeps the usual 
case simple.

Neil V.


Posted on the dev mailing list.