python package - include test suite or not

Question

The main question is: shall I include test suites for my code within the package or not? I do not mean neither a testing framework nor testing tools (such as nosetests) but the basic tests I run each time to check correctness of my code.

I've been following setuptools tutorial and I have two modules: nac (the code itself) and tests. setup.py looks like the following:

setup(
    ...
    packages = ['nac', 'tests'],
    ...
)

And that's how it is installed in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/:

dist-packages/
  nac/
  tests/

I'm pretty sure that what I have now is not the ultimate solution, since tests package refers to nac package - but you can'f figure it out just by looking at dist-packages directory. I was thinking of creating one big nac module with 2 submodules: core and tests. Is it a good approach? Is there a standard pythonic way to solve this issue?

Answer 1

Better put the test cases underneath the main package, i.e. nac.tests. The test cases can use absolute import to load the main nac package.

nac-project/
    nac/
        tests/
    setup.py

In this way, you can run test cases against either 1) the local version, or 2) the deployed version of the nac package.