[Python-Dev] cygwin errors

[Skip Montanaro]

A little more poking around with Google using the error messages I saw led
me to Jason's site:

    http://www.tishler.net/jason/software/rebase/rebase-2.2.README

I installed the rebase package and ran "rebaseall -v" after a fresh reboot
from a cmd window running bash, then rebuilt python.exe from scratch.  That
didn't help with the test_bz2 or test_fork1 failures.

regrtest.py also still craps out in test_poll (though not if run by itself),
so I tried my pairs-o-tests script again with test_poll as the second test.
Nada.  test_poll always succeeded, regardless of the result of the
preceeding test (success, skip, failure).

I then tried (unsuccessfully) another tack.  I threw all the test names into
a file then ran

    ./python.exe Lib/test/regrtest.py `head $i tests | tail -20` test_poll

for $i ranging from 20 to 230 (the number of lines in the file) in steps of
10.  This tickled a fork() problem with test_tempfile in one situation which
seems like the thing rebaseall was supposed to fix.  I never saw it croak in
test_poll though.

I'm not really equipped to deal with this, so I'm going to leave the
debugging to Jason.  If the evidence Jason collects suggests Python is
tickling a Cygwin bug I think we should forge ahead with the release
candidate unless a workaround is immediately obvious.  There's a fairly hard
deadline for the final release of July 31 so that Python 2.3 gets in the
next version of Mac OS X.  Jack, Just and the rest of the MacPython gang
have put a lot of effort into Python between 2.2 and 2.3.  It would be a
shame to see it miss Apple's release train.

Skip