[Python-Dev] SVN rev. 85392 broke module handling in py3k

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

since SVN rev. 85392, Cython's installation fails on the py3k branch with a 
weird globals error. I think it is related to some sys.modules magic that 
we do in order to support running Cython in Python 3 using lib2to3.

Basically, what we do is, we import some parts of Cython at the beginning 
that are Py3 clean, specifically some distutils build_ext replacement for 
building Cython modules. Then we start up distutils, which first runs 
lib2to3 on Cython's sources to convert them into Py3 code. When it then 
gets to building the binary modules, we remove all Cython modules and 
packages from sys.modules and reimport their 2to3-ed sources so that we can 
run the complete compiler during the installation (to bootstrap parts of 
Cython into binary modules).

Since the above revision, this process bails out with an error when 
accessing "os.path" because "os" is None. The "os" module is imported 
globally in our early-imported build_ext module, more or less like this:

     import os

     from distutils.command import build_ext as _build_ext

     class build_ext(_build_ext.build_ext):

         def build_extensions(self):
             print(os) # prints None!

I suspect that the fact that we remove the modules from sys.modules somehow 
triggers the cleanup of these modules while there are still objects from 
these modules alive that refer to their globals. So, what I think is 
happening is that the module cleanup sets the module's globals to None 
before the objects from that module that refer to these globals have 
actually gone out of scope.

Could someone (benjamin?) please look into this?

Thanks,

Stefan