build: Include tests in source distributions #2285
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Include test files in the source distribution, to make it possible to run them while repackaging from sources. This permits Linux distributions to use signed PyPI release artficats rather than having to use the git repository directly. Fixes narwhals-dev#2284
Does it matter? Regular users install from wheels anyway. Almost all users of source distributions are downstream repackagers who actually want tests.
On top of that, PyPI supports signed attestations which provide an additional layer of authentication. |
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So this wouldn't affect the wheel, but only the |
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Yes. I suppose the diff can be confusing, but I've verified that Hatchling includes only the |
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Thanks - would it work if we just included a subset of tests? I'm just wondering if people will see a large tar gz file on github and draw the wrong conclusion |
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That wouldn't work for us, since we want to run as many tests as possible (and they are fast enough not to justify skipping some). Not sure how much that can actually help you either, given that without tests, the tarball is already 253 KiB (with tests, it's 432 KiB — I'm not really convinced people can really infer anything from these two numbers). Another option would be to generate a separate tarball and upload it somewhere (e.g. attach to GitHub release) — but that's more work. An extra advantage of that approach is that you would be able to use a stronger compression. |
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thanks for measuring + explaining! i don't know much about packaging (and virtually nothing about linux distributions) but i'll look into this shortly, we can probably get this into the next release thanks for your interest here! |
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Thank you for this PR!
I'm also definitely not an expert in packaging/linux distributions but I took this opportunity to learn more about it 😄
It looks like there is a bit of debate whether it is a requirement to include tests in sdist or not and it seems that the answer is "it depends but there is no harm in doing so": see "Should sdists include docs and tests?""
The Python Packaging documentation says at some point:
Wheels are meant to contain exactly what is to be installed, and nothing more. In particular, wheels should never include tests and documentation, while sdists commonly do.
I checked what some of the most common library do. pandas and scikit-learn have tests in both wheel and sdist because their tests are close to the source code not in a separate folder. Our friend polars has docs and tests (and other stuff) in sdists but not in wheel. See tar.gz:
In our case we could use the tool.hatch.build.target.<target> functionality to include what we want. I tried locally and this seems to do the trick:
[tool.hatch.build.targets.sdist]
include = [
"narwhals/*",
"tests/*",
# or docs too?
# "docs/*",
]
[tool.hatch.build.targets.wheel]
include = [
"narwhals/*",
]I think include is still better than exclude so that we don't have to update these lines each time we add a new file in root (e.g. just noticed that we ship the Makefile in the .tar.gz)
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Include test files in the source distribution, to make it possible to run them while repackaging from sources. This permits Linux distributions to use signed PyPI release artficats rather than having to use the git repository directly.