[Python-Dev] memory leaks in 2.2 (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake@acm.org
Thu, 6 Dec 2001 01:58:38 -0500

Tim Peters writes:

Which is bad news: it means that test_binop and test_parser had leaks for reasons independent of each other, and of all the others on the list: we're not making swift progress on these. You only looked at test_parser because Guido assigned it to you. I only looked at test_binop because I was coughing too hard to get any difficult work done .

Aside from these specific memory-leak reports, we've generally fallen down on bug triage. I'm not sure what we can do about this in the short term, but I really think we're not doing as good a job at this as we should be. I wonder if we could take a lesson from the Mozilla community and organize Bug Days (group hack days where the goal is to resolve bugs) or have a "BugAThon" where we call for smaller/simpler test cases that exercise reported bugs. I suspect a page about how to narrow down a bug to a smaller test case would be very helpful, especially if it also discusses how to use the various available tools for things like pinpointing leaks, etc.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr. PythonLabs at Zope Corporation