1) making a rule that forbids marking tests as "test" is really not
helping in any case but only shows we try to fix a broken concept.
The broken concept is that "test" means "non-main, need a flag to consume", while code inside a test bundle is the main code and is visible according to usual OSGi rules without further filtering, not some sidekick stuff.
So what's broken is marking test sources inside test bundles as "non-main, need a flag to consume" while they are regular source.
2) The concept of "test-fragments" is and was always broken, its just
PDE that refuses to support common concepts and thus we where forced to
use them for years leading to hard to find, hard to manage and hard to
run tests.
So it would be better to (now that Tycho supports this and its still
possible to run them in JDT/PDE) migrate to either
a) put *unit* tests that test /internal/ state (e.g. not exported API)
in a 'src_test' folder
b) put *integration* tests that test the /exported/ state (e.g. public
exported API, interaction with the UI) ...
then there is no need for "test-fragments" and no need for annoyance and
all this maps perfectly to whats common to most developers.
> 1. it's "contaminating": changing it requires downstream consumers to
> also act on their .classpath to get things working again
I would say it gives consumers a "valuable warning that they do assume
wrong things" :-)
> 2. it's adding no value in the traditional plugin development workflow
It does as the "traditional plugin development workflow" was always a
workaround because the tools we are using refused to support this. As
this is different now I don't see any reason for keeping this workarounds.
> 3. it can even cause troubles now that support for test folders in
> Plugins can be interpreted differently by PDE or Tycho (just like
> tests in Maven world).
They are not interpreted differently, PDE simply do not make any
distinction (JDT does!).
By the way its not PDE adding that meta-data as far as I know, the only
one doing it automatically is m2eclipse.
All that is another topic, I'm talking here about things working as expected according to usual workflows and artifacts that have worked for 20 years and basically suggesting we fix the current state to restore consistency with OSGi runtime: what is exported in the main jar is not test.
