[PEAK] setuptools: Test works only after second invocation

[P.J. Eby]

At 12:34 PM 4/29/2010 -0400, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
>Is setuptools by any chance doing more of this kind of black magic?

Sure, lots.  ;-)

>I'm about to start debugging a second, even more mysterious looking 
>problem when running the test command. If it is used in combination 
>with Psyco, I get exceptions after all the tests have completed:

These exceptions are happening at Python shutdown.  You can tell by this bit:

>     return embedframe(_psyco.getframe(depth+1))
>AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'getframe'

_psyco is obviously 'None' here -- which would only happen during the 
Python shutdown phase where the interpreter sets *all* module globals 
to None.  So the problem is that your excepthook implementation is 
running during that phase.  It probably doesn't have anything to do 
with setuptools, but you'll need to change your code to work 
correctly at shutdown time in order to find out what the real error(s) are.


>Is there also an ez_setup.py available that downloads this (or any 
>newer release) automatically?

Not at the moment.  (Of course, as you pointed out, the second and 
subsequent run of tests work fine.)


>  I don't want to require people to first manually upgrade setuptools..
>
>Or is it possible to work around this problem somehow? Is the 
>original file class backed up somewhere, so that I can refer to the backup?

You can use this to monkeypatch the problem:

    if file is setuptools.sandbox._open:
        file = setuptools.sandbox._file

It won't break out of the sandbox if you're in the sandbox, but it'll 
fix the problem if it's current.

Unfortunately, one thing that your code has shown is that you can't 
subclass 'file' while the sandbox is active, and if you manage to 
subclass 'file' before the sandbox is activated, you'll be able to 
bypass it.  That's a little troubling for the strength of the 
sandbox, so in future versions I should probably do a subclass check 
and issue warnings for unexpected file subclasses when the sandbox is 
started running.