Another scenario is tests that are expensive and/or require a third party account, so that a user is very unlikely to run them. Libs that are wrappers for web services are examples I have, like AWS or echonest or Google api discovery. Can't test interacting with the service without an account configured, and the tests may have nontrivial I/O or even $ costs. Having said that I'm not sure in my cases the cost to download/install the tests is such a big deal, as opposed to the cost or manual setup to run them. <div class="gmail_quote">On Oct 16, 2013 10:09 PM, "Sam Tobin-Hochstadt" <<a href="mailto:samth@cs.indiana.edu">samth@cs.indiana.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 7:55 AM, Robby Findler <<a href="mailto:robby@eecs.northwestern.edu">robby@eecs.northwestern.edu</a>> wrote: > it would be nice to have a positive rationale for why we suggest leaving > this particular piece out of "X". Here's my positive rationale: First, why include "X-doc"? I expect that if I tell someone they should try out Typed Racket, or Slideshow, or Frog, or some other bit of Racket software, I'll suggest that they do 'raco pkg install X', for whichever X we're talking about. This means that 'X' should contain all the stuff they'd want to use. In particular, I assume that almost everyone who's intentionally installing 'X' will want X's documentation. However, I don't think that everyone will want the tests -- if they do want the tests, it will be in a situation like you described, where asking someone to 'raco pkg install X-test' is easy. But why not just install X-test anyway, in case they need it? I think this goes back to why we're not shipping absolutely everything at once. There's a cost to a bigger download, whether that's someone deciding not to download a big file because the file size scares them off (a real phenomenon), or a network error that wouldn't have happened with a smaller download, or even actual monetary cost for someone on a metered network. Sam _________________________ Racket Developers list: <a href="http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev" target="_blank">http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev</a> </blockquote></div>