On Thu, Oct 12, 2000 at 12:39:40PM -0500, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Of course something is producing cyclic garbage!
The DOM tree is full of parent and child links.
Does this output mean that the GC works correctly? Or does it mean that there is a reason why this garbage cannot be disposed of? In the latter case, could that be because there are __del__ methods?
The -l option tries to find any cyclic garbage produced by the tests. I don't think that that option should be enabled default. The output means that the GC is working and is finding stuff that would not be freed by reference counting alone. I can't tell if the GC would free this garbage. The -l option sets the DEBUG_SAVEALL option which causes all garbage found to end up in gc.garbage, not just garbage the can't be cleaned up. I don't have pyexpat installed here so I can't test it. If you want to find out if test_minidom is creating garbage the collector can't free you should comment out the: gc.set_debug(gc.DEBUG_SAVEALL) line in regrtest.py and run: regrtest.py -l test_minidom If that does what I think it does and you still get the "garbage: " line then the test is creating evil things. :) Neil