[Python-Dev] test_bigmem and test_bigaddrspace broken (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Wed Mar 17 22:16:45 CET 2010

As mentioned I have access to a 16GB machine which is able to run the tests. The problem is that nobody seems interested in maintaining these tests.

So what do you propose to do?

I personally don't see that as a problem. Many rarely-used features get infrequent testing - that's the nature of rarely-used features. In turn, they tend to break over time, until somebody comes along and fixes them. That's open source: scratch your own itches.

As far as I can say, the initial committer is Thomas Wouters, and not much happened since then. It seems to me that big companies such as Google and Apple would be the primarily concerned ones by such scenarios, and willing to ensure they run fine.

I'm not sure Apple has really Python applications running that use a lot of memory - being a big company doesn't necessarily mean you operate large machines. I'm sure Google has applications that use that much memory, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google has also bug fixes for various bugs in large objects that they haven't been contributing (yet).

In any case, I think it's a good thing that these tests are there for people to run if they have the hardware and the time. If somebody wanted to contribute such hardware as a build slave - that could certainly be arranged.

Regards, Martin

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