Spurious test failure in distutils

[ronaldoussoren]

BPO	8730
Nosy	@ronaldoussoren, @pitrou, @tarekziade, @merwok, @iritkatriel

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = 'https://github.com/tarekziade'
closed_at = <Date 2020-11-09.00:04:53.115>
created_at = <Date 2010-05-16.12:21:56.440>
labels = ['type-bug', 'library']
title = 'Spurious test failure in distutils'
updated_at = <Date 2020-11-09.00:04:53.113>
user = 'https://github.com/ronaldoussoren'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2020-11-09.00:04:53.113>
actor = 'iritkatriel'
assignee = 'tarek'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2020-11-09.00:04:53.115>
closer = 'iritkatriel'
components = ['Distutils']
creation = <Date 2010-05-16.12:21:56.440>
creator = 'ronaldoussoren'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 8730
keywords = []
message_count = 8.0
messages = ['105862', '105864', '105866', '105899', '105900', '105914', '131598', '380566']
nosy_count = 5.0
nosy_names = ['ronaldoussoren', 'pitrou', 'tarek', 'eric.araujo', 'iritkatriel']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'out of date'
stage = 'resolved'
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = 'behavior'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue8730'
versions = ['Python 2.7', 'Python 3.2', 'Python 3.3', 'Python 3.4']

[ronaldoussoren]

Output of test_distutils on a older SuSE Linux system:

FAILED (errors=1, skipped=5)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../Lib/test/test_distutils.py", line 18, in <module>
    test_main()
  File "../Lib/test/test_distutils.py", line 13, in test_main
    test_support.run_unittest(distutils.tests.test_suite())
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/test/test_support.py", line 1038, in run_unittest
    _run_suite(suite)
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/test/test_support.py", line 1021, in _run_suite
    raise TestFailed(err)
test.test_support.TestFailed: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/tests/test_archive_util.py", line 167, in test_compress_deprecated
    make_tarball(base_name, 'dist', compress='compress')
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/archive_util.py", line 116, in make_tarball
    spawn(cmd, dry_run=dry_run)
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/spawn.py", line 34, in spawn
    _spawn_posix(cmd, search_path, dry_run=dry_run)
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/spawn.py", line 141, in _spawn_posix
    (cmd[0], exit_status)
DistutilsExecError: command 'compress' failed with exit status 1

This system has a fake 'compress' command that only supports uncompress functionality:

$ compress --help
Usage: compress OPTION FILE
Dummy script for uncompressing legacy shar files.

with OPTION in:
      --help      display this help and exit
      --version   output version information and exit

-d uncompress

Use `gzip' for compressing files.

[tarekziade]

ouch, what a bad practice...

The compress feature is going away anyway.

Could you tell me what "compress --version" says ?

Maybe we can use that output to discard this fake command when looking for the compress program.

[ronaldoussoren]

$ compress --version
compress - sharutils 4.2c

And yes, this is jucky behavior. Most systems shouldn't be affected by this because sharutils isn't used a lot these days.

[tarekziade]

So do you know if this is specific to all sharutils versions ?

I could read the version and raise a specific error in that case.
*or* just not fix this bug and fix the test so it's permissive in this very particular case (by looking at the compression version)

What do you think ?

[pitrou]

Just skip the test, IMO.

[ronaldoussoren]

I'd also skip the test, this is not a bug in Python but a broken compress executable.

[merwok]

Ronald, can you tell what would be the check to put in skipIf?

[iritkatriel]

The skip has been added:

@unittest.skipUnless(find_executable('compress'),
'The compress program is required')
def test_compress_deprecated(self):

cpython/Lib/distutils/tests/test_archive_util.py

Line 204 in 23831a7

@unittest.skipUnless(find_executable('compress'),