[Python-Dev] testing with and without pyc files present (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Tue, 06 May 2003 12:04:20 -0400

The test targets in the Makefile first delete any .py[co] files, then run the test suite twice. I know there must be a reason for this, but isn't there a less sledgehammer-like and more explicit way to test whatever this is trying to test?

In the past, we've had problems where bugs in the marshalling or elsewhere caused bytecode read from .pyc files to behave differently than bytecode generated directly from a .py source file. Sometimes the bytecode read from a .pyc file had the bug, somtimes the directly generated bytecode. This is sometimes a very shy bug needing a lot of sample data. How else would you propose to test this?

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