Here is the log of the single failing test: 
attached 
 
 

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Same happends on i386

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Same here.

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This failure happens only when testing as root, because then
permissions don't have usual meaning, when testing as user,
it works fine.

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I am having the same problem with Mandrake 10.1. I have an AMD chip with at least a i686 architecture. My Mandrake 10.1 is set at security level 3.

In the past (RedHat, Gentoo), I have installed programs from source as follows:
1. su to root.
2. Copy the tar ball (.tgz, .tar.gz, or .tar.bz2) into /usr/local/src.
3. Expand the tar ball.
4. cd to the top directory of the new source tree.
5. Follow the directions given there.

For Mandrake 10.1, this process failed when installing Python 2.4. The failure occured during "make test"  in test_shutil.py with the same error message as above in this thread. Nigel said above that "This failure happens only when testing as root, because then permissions don't have usual meaning". Have the meaning of the root permissions changed? What do the root permissions now mean? Is this documented somewhere?

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I meant, that as root you can do anything regardless actual
file permissions:

as root:

# mkdir test
# touch test/file
# chmod 400 test
# ll -d test
dr--------  2 root   root     4096 2004-12-04 22:00 test
# rm -rf test
#

as user:

$ mkdir test
$ touch test/file
$ chmod 400 test
$ ll -d test
dr--------  2 michal michal 4096 2004-12-04 22:05 test
$ rm -rf test
rm: cannot chdir from `.' to `test': Permission denied
$

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Fixed by not running this test when running as root. Checked
in on both HEAD and release24-maint.