This one took me way longer that it should have to figure out. Granted, it was buried in a test case in larger body of code, and a fresh look after a nights sleep solved it, but still…… YMMV
The problem? A simple file comparison was failing intermittently. First, an example of the code in question:
$ cat file_compare.py import filecmp import sys # create a reference data file data = "Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!\n" * 1975 reference = 'quote.txt' rf = open(reference, 'w') rf.write(data) rf.close() # write a bunch of files, and make sure they # match the reference data for i in range(10): filename = 'quote%d.txt' % i df = open(filename, 'w') df.write(data) df.close if filecmp.cmp(reference, filename) is not True: print 'Error: Files are different in pass %d!' % i sys.exit() print 'All files are the same like they should be.'
Running the test case :
$ python file_compare.py Error: Files are different in pass 0! $ python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54869, Apr 18 2007, 22:08:04) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5367)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import filecmp >>> filecmp.cmp('quote.txt', 'quote0.txt') True >>>
Update: The actual code was in test_XmlWrite.py, line 563.