[Python-Dev] red buildbots on 2.7

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 6:16 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> The test_posix failure is a regression from 2.6 (but it only shows up on
>> some machines - it is caused by a fairly braindead implementation of a
>> couple of posix apis by Apple apparently).
>>
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue7900
>
> Ah, that one. I definitely think this should *not* block the release:

I agree that this is nowhere near being a release blocker, but I think
it would be nice to do something about it before the final release.

> a) there is no clear solution in sight. So if we wait for it resolved,
>   it could take months until we get a 2.7 release.

The ideal solution will have to wait until Apple gets its act together
and fixed the problem on their end.  I would say "months" is an overly
optimistic time estimate for that.  However, the issue is a regression
from prior versions.  In 2.5 getgroups would truncate the list to 16
groups, but won't crash.  More importantly the 16 groups returned
would be correct per-process groups and not something immune to
setgroup changes.

I proposed a very simple fix:

http://bugs.python.org/file16326/no-darwin-ext.diff

which simply minimally reverts the change that introduced the regression.

> b) it's only about getgroups - a fairly minor API.

Agree, but failing regression test is an annoyance particularly in
this case where the diagnostic from the test is very vague.  Short of
fixing the problem, we can skip the failing test on OSX if getgroups
raises exception.

> c) IIUC, it only occurs to users which are member of more than 16
>   groups - a fairly uncommon setup.
>

Unfortunately it is fairly common.  The default root account on OSX is
member of 18 groups.  Given that many os tests require root
privileges, people will run these tests as root.