Output of test_distutils on a older SuSE Linux system:

FAILED (errors=1, skipped=5)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../Lib/test/test_distutils.py", line 18, in <module>
    test_main()
  File "../Lib/test/test_distutils.py", line 13, in test_main
    test_support.run_unittest(distutils.tests.test_suite())
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/test/test_support.py", line 1038, in run_unittest
    _run_suite(suite)
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/test/test_support.py", line 1021, in _run_suite
    raise TestFailed(err)
test.test_support.TestFailed: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/tests/test_archive_util.py", line 167, in test_compress_deprecated
    make_tarball(base_name, 'dist', compress='compress')
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/archive_util.py", line 116, in make_tarball
    spawn(cmd, dry_run=dry_run)
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/spawn.py", line 34, in spawn
    _spawn_posix(cmd, search_path, dry_run=dry_run)
  File "/home/xsupport/rtest/python-trunk/Lib/distutils/spawn.py", line 141, in _spawn_posix
    (cmd[0], exit_status)
DistutilsExecError: command 'compress' failed with exit status 1


This system has a fake 'compress' command that only supports uncompress functionality:

$ compress --help
Usage: compress OPTION FILE
Dummy script for uncompressing legacy shar files.

with OPTION in:
      --help      display this help and exit
      --version   output version information and exit

  -d              uncompress

Use `gzip' for compressing files.

ouch, what a bad practice... 

The compress feature is going away anyway.

Could you tell me what "compress --version" says ?

Maybe we can use that output to discard this fake command when looking for the compress program.

$ compress --version
compress - sharutils 4.2c

And yes, this is jucky behavior. Most systems shouldn't be affected by this because sharutils isn't used a lot these days.

So do you know if this is specific to all sharutils versions ? 

I could read the version and raise a specific error in that case.
*or* just not fix this bug and fix the test so it's permissive in this very particular case (by looking at the compression version)

What do you think ?

Just skip the test, IMO.

I'd also skip the test, this is not a bug in Python but a broken compress executable.

Ronald, can you tell what would be the check to put in skipIf?

The skip has been added:

@unittest.skipUnless(find_executable('compress'),
                     'The compress program is required')
def test_compress_deprecated(self):

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/23831a7a90956e38b7d70304bb6afe30d37936de/Lib/distutils/tests/test_archive_util.py#L204