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

Michael Hudson mwh@python.net
17 Dec 2001 14:36:59 +0000

"Fred L. Drake, Jr." <fdrake@acm.org> writes:

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.

And I think you'd have fun getting anything like that to run on MacOS before OSX, and probably other oddball platforms (Windows at least has the os.spawn* functions).

Making the test suite less portable is /unlikely/ to be a win, I'd have thought.

Cheers, M.

-- People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work if it just results in what I consider to be a better system. -- Linus Torvalds