[Zope-dev] Re: Reminder: feature freeze November 1.

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
>>>     Windows test failures on Zope trunk
>>>     http://www.zope.org/Collectors/Zope/1931

[Tres]
>> Without Windows-centric developers who are motivated to investigate and
>> fix those bugs, I don't know what else we can do.

[Mark Hammond]
> That bugs points at
> http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2005-October/025512.html, which
> quotes Tim as saying:
>
> : No idea where this slash-vs-backslash confusion ultimately comes from,
> : though.  Who recently checked code in hard-coding "/" as a path
> : separator?
>
> So in this specific example, the problem seems less a lack of Windows
> centric developers, but more an abundance of non-Windows-centric developers
> :)
>
> These test failures appear at first glance to not be windows specific at
> all - just possibly pointing at non-portable code written by others.  As a
> Windows developer, I'm afraid I have no idea where I would start looking for
> this bug.

Alas, I was directed not to work on this bug report "on the clock",
and I haven't had spare time to donate to it (of course there's the
usually irony with that:  by now I've probably spent 3x as long typing
about these bugs as it would have taken to fix them :-( ...).

Because I'm sure I noticed the bug within a day or two of its first
appearance, the obvious approach is to revert back to earlier
revisions of the trunk until finding the checkin that caused it.  I
thought I wrote up enough clues on zope-dev at the time that whoever
checked in the responsible change would think "ah, that's related to
what I did!" at once.  Alas again, nobody noticed.

So that's a clear path to fixing this one:  pinning the blame should
be sufficient ;-)  In the absence of the guilty party noticing they
were to blame, it takes someone on Windows to do the binary search
required (because someone on Linux won't see the failure).

BTW, notice that the Python tracebacks had exactly the same \ vs /
mixup in the same place (between "lib" and "python") as the two
originally failing tests.  That suggests (but doesn't prove) that a
change to sys.path is the ultimate cause.

BTW2, I have no idea why the later-failing Five test started failing
on Windows, and didn't spend any time investigating that one.