[Python-Dev] OS X buildbots: why am I skipping these tests?

[Bill Janssen]

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
> > My Leopard and Tiger PPC buildbots are momentarily green!  But I'm
> > looking into why I'm skipping some tests.  My buildbots are up-to-date
> > OS-wise and very vanilla, with the latest applicable Xcode.
> >
> > 4 skips unexpected on darwin:
> >    test_gdb test_ioctl test_readline test_ttk_guionly
> >
> > Three of these (gdb, readline, ttk_guionly) are just bad predictions of
> > which tests should skip on Darwin, I think -- gdb is only version 6, so
> > that test won't run, readline doesn't get built, ttk doesn't work
> > without Tcl/Tk 8.5.
> 
> So it looks like you gould get readline and ttk to run and pass by
> separately downloading and installing readline (I've done this many
> times before) and Tcl/Tk (no idea but I suppose it should work).

Sure.  But the skips should be expected "on Darwin", since a vanilla OS
X system apparently won't have the necessary bits.  At the very least,
regrtest.py should test for these conditions and add them to the
"expected skips" list if necessary.  I'll work up a patch.

> > But the the skip of test_ioctl baffles me.
> >
> > "test_ioctl skipped -- Unable to open /dev/tty"
> >
> > But when I log in via ssh and try it with the system python:
> >
> > ~ wjanssen$ python
> > python
> > Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jun 17 2009, 20:37:34)
> > [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
> > Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>>> open("/dev/tty")
> > open("/dev/tty")
> > <open file '/dev/tty', mode 'r' at 0x597b8>
> >>>>
> >
> > Seems to work fine.  So this I don't understand.  Any ideas, anyone?
> 
> Maybe the buildbot runs the tests as a tty-less daemon process. If you
> ask me it's pretty crazy to have a test that requires a tty. But there
> you have it -- and it's the same in Python 3. (But then again, who
> knows, I might have written that test. ;-)

So, my question then is, why are these skips "unexpected"?  Seems to me
that if this is the case, this test will never run on any platform.

Bill