Don't ship tests to npm

[frantic]

Currently, when I npm install protobufjs I get node_modules/protobufjs/tests with about 1.6Mb worth of files.

[dcodeIO]

The last time I checked there were more people considering it good practice to include tests than the opposite. Not sure if this has changed in the meantime.

[frantic]

What's the benefit? Where can I read more?

I found this, but I think the point the selected answer is making about tests is pretty weak. Also, your package does have devDependencies (that are not installed when you npm install protobufjs), and the tests probably can't even be run without them.

[dcodeIO]

The only actual benefit I see is if there is a dependent who is, for some reason, running protobuf.js tests from within their tests, for example because they override some of its functionality manually and want to be sure that it didn't break the original test case.

Regarding devDependencies: Well, that is true but you can always run npm install in the package's directory to make it work. The alternative here would be to make the tests its own module, but that sounds like some not absolutely necessary extra-work.

As a compromise I can try to reduce the overall size of the shipped test cases by removing generated files (these are the large bits), and let these generate once when installing dev dependencies or something like that.

[frantic]

Thanks for the response! I noticed tests because Flow complained about an invalid json inside protobufjs package, so I had to blacklist it in the [ignore] section of my .flowconfig.

a dependent who is, for some reason, running protobuf.js tests from within their tests

I think it's a very rare use case. If somebody needs to modify functionality they can just fork the package on Github?

protobufjs package is very popular, 15K downloads/day. I just wanted to flag this for you and see if it was intentional, because I've seen other packages unintentionally shipping large files (e.g. microsoft/react-native-code-push#652).

[frantic]

Hey @dcodeIO, I was wondering if you want to merge or close this? I presented my arguments which I still believe make sense.

If you are worried about breaking existing clients that depend on the tests that ship with npm package, maybe consider merging this PR into future major version?

[dcodeIO]

When we exclude tests from npm, we can technically go even further and exclude everything else not necessary for a working npm package as well. Maybe through files in package.json. Hmm.