From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2007-12-22T10:21:08+09:00
Subject: Re: First stab at a weakref test suite



On Dec 21, 6:50 am, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nut...@sun.com>
wrote:
> Eric Hodel wrote:
> > On Dec 20, 2007, at 21:45 PM, Daniel Berger wrote:
> >> I follow the same pattern in the tests, but it doesn't raise the
> >> expected error. Any ideas?
>
> > Since the GC is conservative, references may exist longer than you
> > expect because the item that should be collected is still referenced
> > from the stack.  I don't know of an easy way around this.
>
> This is probably the largest reason why a weakref suite will be a little
> tricky. My best recommendation would be to loop calling GC.start until
> the reference gets collected; perhaps with an upper count... "if we
> reach 1000 iterations and it's not collected, it isn't working".

I took a look at the Python weakref test suite. I quickly realized
that it appeared to be a richer interface. Maybe that's part of the
problem - the interface we have isn't testable. Take a look here:

http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/lib/module-weakref.html

Then again, maybe I'm way off base. Anyway, I think we should at least
take a look at it and see if we want to steal any ideas from it. The
corresponding test file is test_weakref.py, btw.

Regards,

Dan