[Python-Dev] test_minidom non-failure failure? (take 2)

[Jeremy Hylton]

Sorry about the previous message; a mail munger somewhere between my
display and python.org choked on a very long line...

I am getting an occasional, hard-to-reproduce error in test_minidom.
When I run the test, it displays about a thousand lines of garbage,
but the test suite does not report test_minidom as failed or skipped.

The output I see during the test run is this:

test_minidom
garbage: [{'nodeValue': u'Obsolete but implemented...', 'nextSibling':
<DOM Text node "\012">, 'childNodes': None, 'attributes': None,
'parentNode': None, 'data': u'Obsolete but implemented...',
'previousSibling': None}, <DOM Text node "Obsolete b...">,
{'nodeValue': u'\012', 'nextSibling': None, 'childNodes': None, 'a 
[... many hundreds of lines omitted]

At the end of the test, I get a pretty normal result:
95 tests OK.
13 tests skipped: test_al test_cd test_cl test_dbm test_dl test_gl
test_imgfile test_largefile test_nis test_sunaudiodev test_timing
test_winreg test_winsound 

So two questions:

Why is test_minidom producing all this output?  And why is it only
happening intermittently?

Why does regrtest.py think that test_minidom is working correctly when
it produces all this output?

Jeremy