When I consider that the buildslaves are probably donated and not designated exclusively for Python testing, it makes good sense that they typically run under a restricted account.

Given that there is a specific permission that can be assigned to the buildslave user, it seems appropriate that the tests that attempt to create symlinks should fail if the user does not have that permission.

Martin, do you still prefer something that wraps tests that call symlink and only executes those tests if the current user context has that permission?