By analyzing the blame information on this pull request, we identified @FRidh, @domenkozar and @datakurre to be potential reviewers

55-60 MB is a lot, however, I don't think it is a good idea to put this in the specific function of Matplotlib. Instead, I think it would be better if we do this in buildPythonPackage, either with an option like you propose, where you can pass false or a list of paths, or have a specific phase for this.

Also, by removing the tests in the patch phase the software cannot be tested. I don't think that is what we want, though I am not entirely sure how it is done with packages in setup.cfg.

Unfortunately I won't have the time and energy to do a general solution to this. Honestly I don't know enough about Python or Python packaging to even tell whether I could make a general solution :-)

In any case, the proposed patch does not prevent the tests from being run when building the package. It only prevents the test suite (and in particular the large baseline image set) from being installed into the Nix store. Another solution might be the one I see Debian takes, they seem to install the test suite but omit the images.

Closing in favor of a more generic solution.