Consider moving tests/ outside the pandas module

[joaoe]

Problem description

Hi.
After a pip install pandas the lib/site-packages/pands/tests/ includes a lot of testing code which is definitely not relevant for me and many other end users of pandas.
This bloats the installation and makes installation slower.
I'm working on packaging a python environment to distribute with a preinstalled set of modules and application and there are too many popular 3rd-party modules which include unneeded test code, like numpy, IPython jupyterlab, etc, which needs to be striped to keep the package size down. I'll be reporting issues to these projects as well.

Suggestion

Therefore, my suggestion is to keep the pandas module streamlined, and move the tests out. Perhaps create a pandas-unittests module if people are interested in it, or just expect users to checkout the code. Another possibility would be to skip packaging the tests folder and conftest.py when creating packages to upload to pypi.org.

Since you are now almost releasing 1.0 it might be a bit short notice to include this is such a big release. But for the next major release, it could work.

Thank you very much for your attention.

[MarcoGorelli]

Thanks for the suggestion - I think this is a duplicate of #30741 and so will close the issue for now, but please feel free to reopen if you disagree :)

[joaoe]

That seems like it. Thanks. I did search but could not find that issue.