[1/24/06, Tim Peters]
... test_rude_shutdown() is dicey, relying on a sleep() instead of proper synchronization to make it probable that the `listener` thread goes away before the main thread tries to connect, but while that race may account for bogus TestFailed deaths, it doesn't seem possible that it could account for the kind of failure above.
[Tim Peters]
Well, since it's silly to try to guess about one weird failure when a clear cause for another kind of weird failure is known, I checked in changes to do "proper" thread synchronization and termination in that test. Hasn't failed here since, but that's not surprising (it was always a "once in a light blue moon" kind of thing).
Neal plugged another hole later, but-- alas --I have seen the same shy failure since then on WinXP. One of the most recent buildbot test runs saw it too, on a non-Windows box: http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/trunk/g5%20osx.3%20trunk/builds/204/step-... test_socket_ssl test test_socket_ssl crashed -- exceptions.TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable in the second test run there. Still no theory! Maybe we can spend the next 3 days sprinting on it :-)