Don't package test files with gem

[sferik]

I just 🚢 a new version of the rails_admin gem and it took longer to push than I expected. Upon investigating, I realized that was because the gem had grown to 8.1 MB:exclamation: Digging deeper, I was astonished to realize that all but 229 KB were tests! This means that hundreds of thousands of people were downloading a file 36X bigger than necessary to get tests they would almost certainly never run.

This may be an extreme example, as RailsAdmin embeds a full Rails app in the spec directory in order to mount itself as a Rails engine. That said, this problem affects almost every gem, albeit to a lesser extent, and I can’t think of a good reason why any gem should package its tests.

Back in the day, there was a service called Gem Testers (originally at gem-testers.org and eventually at test.rubygems.org) and a corresponding rubygems-test gem that automatically ran the test suite of a every gem on install, however, this service never gained traction and is now offline.

If someone wants to run the tests for a particular gem, they can easily find the source code at the project’s homepage. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when someone installs a gem it’s because they want to execute the code, not the tests. I believe changing this default will improve the health of the RubyGems ecosystem and the Ruby community. If everyone adopts this change, bundle install will be significantly faster, especially in places where bandwidth is constrained (e.g. in hotels, at conferences, on airplanes, when tethered to a 3G connection, and in much of the developing world).

This patch excludes test files from the bundle gem template as well as from Bundler’s own gemspec.

[GeekOnCoffee]

I notice Rails uses examples, is that another one that should be excluded?

[hone]

Off the top of my head, I'm 👍 this.

[parndt]

👍 I'm all for smaller gems.. I've had some terrible Internet connections this year and bundling has been painful

[simi]

all in

there should be only code in gems, no docs, tests, etc...

[sferik]

@simi To be clear, this patch says nothing about documentation, only tests. I think there’s a good case to be made for packaging documentation, even if that documentation is also available online.

@GeekOnCoffee Rails examples are more like documentation than executable tests. Even if we wanted to exclude such code from gems, this patch is not intended to be comprehensive, just to be a better default. People obviously can (and will, and should) edit their gemspecs after they are generated by Bundler.

[simi]

I was thinking about separated docs packages. Something similar to gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc. Docs should be installed (and generated) only when you need them (probably default to true). But there's a lot of cases where you don't need them (servers). Good example of this is pure rails gem (1,4MB of guides).

Maybe time to move this idea to mail-list.

[indirect]

Given the prevailing climate of every gem's source being on github (rather than vanishing as individual websites go down or expire), I think this makes sense. It also helps with situations like Bundler itself, where the tests only pass if run from the git repo.

[sferik]

Cool. Thanks for the feedback.