[Python-Dev] Bizarre new test failure

[Guido van Rossum]

> No, but assuming there isn't a real bug here, repeating gc.collect() until
> it returns 0 would be -- as the self-contained program showed, we *may* need
> to call gc.collect() as many as 4 times before that happens.  And if it's
> legit that it may need 4, I see no reason for believing there's any a priori
> upper bound on how many may be needed.  And the test could have failed all
> along, even in 2.2; it apparently depends on how many times gc just happens
> to run before we get to test_gc.
> 
> I'll check in a "drain it" fix to test_gc, but I'm still squirming.

Hold off.  Neil said he thought there was a bug introduced early
December -- that's before 2.2 was release!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)