[Jack] (BTW all your mail comes poorly folded like shown here. What's up with that?)
I'm +0 on this. The reason I'm not +1 is that 2MB is just as arbitrary as 1MB, and it's only picked because it'll make the current set of tests pass. And the current set of tests doesn't pass on MacOSX because another equally arbitrary number in test_re happens to create a stack >= 1MB but <= 2MB. I would be +1 on just changing the test to fit in a 1MB stack.
That is, unless there are subtleties in the test that I missed, and there really is a reason for the specific choice of the number 50000.
I vaguely recall that the number 50000 is somewhat historically significant, but I don't remember why. But it works on all other platforms I know. Do you know if setting the stack limit actually allocates that much memory for the stack in the process in Mac OSX, or does it only reserve VM space (like on traditional Unix)? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)