Move tests to separate directories, and document

Today, with the tests inside a `tests` intermingled with the
corresponding library's source code, we have a few problems:

- We have to be careful that wildcards don't end up with tests being
  built as part of Nix proper, or test headers being installed as part
  of Nix proper.

- Tests in libraries but not executables is not right:

  - It means each executable runs the previous unit tests again, because
    it needs the libraries.

  - It doesn't work right on Windows, which doesn't want you to load a
    DLL just for the side global variable . It could be made to work
    with the dlopen equivalent, but that's gross!

This reorg solves these problems.

There is a remaining problem which is that sibbling headers (like
`hash.hh` the test header vs `hash.hh` the main `libnixutil` header) end
up shadowing each other. This PR doesn't solve that. That is left as
future work for a future PR.

Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>

(cherry picked from commit 91b6833686a6a6d9eac7f3f66393ec89ef1d3b57)
(cherry picked from commit a61e42adb528b3d40ce43e07c79368d779a8b624)

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/doc/manual/src/contributing/testing.md b/doc/manual/src/contributing/testing.md
index ccd90088e..1b15d12b1 100644
--- a/doc/manual/src/contributing/testing.md
+++ b/doc/manual/src/contributing/testing.md
@@ -3,13 +3,25 @@
 ## Unit-tests
 
 The unit-tests for each Nix library (`libexpr`, `libstore`, etc..) are defined
-under `src/{library_name}/tests` using the
+under `tests/unit/{library_name}/tests` using the
 [googletest](https://google.github.io/googletest/) and
 [rapidcheck](https://github.com/emil-e/rapidcheck) frameworks.
 
 You can run the whole testsuite with `make check`, or the tests for a specific component with `make libfoo-tests_RUN`.
 Finer-grained filtering is also possible using the [--gtest_filter](https://google.github.io/googletest/advanced.html#running-a-subset-of-the-tests) command-line option, or the `GTEST_FILTER` environment variable.
 
+### Unit test support libraries
+
+There are headers and code which are not just used to test the library in question, but also downstream libraries.
+For example, we do [property testing] with the [rapidcheck] library.
+This requires writing `Arbitrary` "instances", which are used to describe how to generate values of a given type for the sake of running property tests.
+Because types contain other types, `Arbitrary` "instances" for some type are not just useful for testing that type, but also any other type that contains it.
+Downstream types frequently contain upstream types, so it is very important that we share arbitrary instances so that downstream libraries' property tests can also use them.
+
+It is important that these testing libraries don't contain any actual tests themselves.
+On some platforms they would be run as part of every test executable that uses them, which is redundant.
+On other platforms they wouldn't be run at all.
+
 ## Functional tests
 
 The functional tests reside under the `tests/functional` directory and are listed in `tests/functional/local.mk`.