[Python-Dev] regrtest.py mystery (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake@acm.org
Mon, 17 Dec 2001 09:32:00 -0500 (EST)

M.-A. Lemburg writes:

How about following Fred's suggestion to run each test in a separate process (possibly as an option to regrtest.py) ?!

I wasn't really suggesting it, but it would solve this particular problem. Note that the effectiveness of this to solve this particular problem depends on the set of modules regrtest itself imports; if it imports something and catches an ImportError, using a simple fork() to create the child is not sufficient. Using fork()/exec() would be extremely slow and should be avoided if we can. Frankly, I like that we find interactions between the tests, so I'm not convinced that there are any real problems with the test framework. I do use to a C unit test package that uses fork() to make sure individual tests can't core the framework, but that's not what we're protecting against here.

-Fred

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