On Mar 28, 2005, at 6:21 PM, Randy W. Sims wrote:
I think someone had proposed a year or two ago that there should be a test_requires options and I argued against it. Now, I think maybe it was a good idea; especially, since the number of extra testing modules being used have increased a lot over that time.
I think there's one really good argument in favor of splitting it out and one really good argument against.
In favor: if we knew the subset of build_requires that were actually needed for testing, then it would be easier for people to squirrel away the regression tests and run them again after the module is installed. I think people have been vaguely wanting that for a long time.
Against: in the perl culture (largely because of the way MakeMaker has always been implemented), testing has always been seen as an integral part of the build process. By having people declare testing dependencies as part of build_requires, we reinforce this notion.
On the whole, though, I think it's probably a good idea.
On a related note, we should probably finally make the prerequisite-specification system treat the requirement level (requires vs. recommends vs. conflicts) and requirement scope (build vs. test vs. runtime) as completely orthogonal. Currently there's no such thing as build_recommends, for instance, but there's really no good reason it's missing.
-Ken
