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.
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