[Python-Dev] windows buildbot failures

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
>> ...
>> 2. The buildbot code tries to kill the process itself.  It appears (to judge
>>    from the buildbot messges) that this never works on Windows.
>>
>> 3. For reasons that are still unknown, python_d.exe keeps running,
>>    and forever.

[Martin]
> It's actually not too surprising that python_d.exe keeps running.

No, what's surprising is that it keeps running _forever_.  This isn't
Unix, and, e.g., a defunct child process doesn't sit around waiting
for its parent to reap it.  Why doesn't the leftover python_d.exe
complete running the test suite, and then go away all by itself?  It
doesn't, no matter how long you wait.  That's the mystery to me.

> The buildbot has a process handle for the cmd.exe process that runs
> test.bat. python_d.exe is only a child process of process. So killing
> cmd.exe wouldn't help, even if it worked.

It suppose it's possible that killing cmd.exe actually did work, but
the buildbot code misreports the outcome, and python_d.exe "runs
forever" because it's blocked waiting on some resource (console I/O
handle?) it inherited from its (no longer there) parent process.