[Python-Dev] Re: [Python-checkins] CVS: python/dist/src/Lib/test test_dumbdbm.py,NONE,1.1

[Guido van Rossum]

> > > > filename = '/tmp/delete_me'
> > > 
> > > This reminds me: we need a portable way to handle test-files :)
> > Yeah, I noticed that this test failed on Windows -- fixed now.
> 
> > The test_support module exports TESTFN; there's also tempfile.mktemp()
> > which should generate temporary files on all platforms.
> > Is that enough?
> 
> Well, there is one more issue, which we can't fix terribly easy: test_fcntl
> tries to flock() the file. flock() doesn't work on all filesystems (like
> NFS) :P If we cared a lot, we could try several alternatives (current dir,
> /tmp, /var/tmp) in the specific case of flock, but personally I don't want to
> bother, and real sysadmins (who should care about the test failure) are more
> likely to build Python on a local disk than in their NFS-mounted
> homedirectory. At least that's how we do it :-) 

These days, I would think that it's a pretty sure bet that the
system's tmp directory is not on NFS.  Then we could just use
tempfile.mktemp() in that module, right?  Or does the /tmp filesystem
on Linux (which AFAIK is a RAM disk implemented in virtual memory so
it uses swap space when it runs out of RAM) not support locking?

I don't particularly care about fixing this -- I haven't seen bug
reports about this.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)