On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 11:47 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
Well, in my opinion "batteries included" is great, but not when one of the batteries consistently acts up and requires a good shake to get working again. The bsddb module has consistent reliability issues when it comes to testing (and I suspect it has more to do with Sleepycat than the bindings). I know I am tired of getting buildbot errors saying that the bsddb tests died more consistently than most tests over their history.
I agree that bsddb has been a pain. It's about 1 of 10 tests that fill that category. I've been working on reducing these problems (recently: test_bsddb3, test_smptlib, test_xmlrpclib, and I'm sure there are others I forgot). Rather than remove modules, it would be more productive if we fixed the flaky tests. Then we wouldn't have to ignore failures, we could trust the buildbots. test_urllib*net tests still fail regularly, I think because some hosts aren't available from time to time. Can someone look into making test_urllib*net more robust? We also need to make the tests more robust. By fixing test_smtplib, I sped it up by over 99% while making it more robust. Any test that uses threads and sleeps (really just sleeps) needs to be fixed similarly. Can someone find which tests still use sleep? n