The proposed patch solves the problem with TemporaryDirectory cleanup. If shutil.rmtree() failed because module globals are set to None, TemporaryDirectory now uses own rmtree implementation which does not depends from globals. The patch also fixes other minor problems related to __del__ and fixes do_create() in tests (it deleted subdirectories just after creation).

See also issue10188.

An alternative would be to use weakref.finalize() which would guarantee that cleanup happens before any purging occurs.  That would allow the use of shutil:

class TemporaryDirectory(object):
    def __init__(self, suffix="", prefix=template, dir=None):
        self.name = mkdtemp(suffix, prefix, dir)
        self._cleanup = weakref.finalize(self, shutil.rmtree, self.name)

    def __enter__(self):
        return self.name

    def __exit__(self, exc, value, tb):
        self._cleanup()

    def cleanup(self):
        self._cleanup()

Sounds good to me!

Updated patch to tip.

An alternative with weakref.finalize() looks very attractive, but unfortunately tests are failed with it.

Here is a patch which implements Richard's suggestion. test_del_on_shutdown and test_warnings_on_cleanup are failed, but perhaps they are wrong.

Note the finalize-based patch can only work on 3.4.

Here is a working patch for the finalize-based approach.

Excellent, Antoine!

Here is a patch for 3.3 with tests based on Antoine's patch. My changes to tests:

* TemporaryDirectory instance is preserved as attributes of several modules. So some modules can be destroyed before cleaning up temporary directory.

* Resource warning is not checked because the warning module can be destroyed at time of cleaning up temporary directory.

Here are updated patches for 3.3 and 3.4. Changed tests for 3.4, a patch for 
3.3 is changed more. Unfortunately in 3.3 exceptions still can be raised when 
try to emit a warning during shutdown. Is there any way to determine the 
shutdown mode?

> Here are updated patches for 3.3 and 3.4. Changed tests for 3.4, a patch for 
> 3.3 is changed more. Unfortunately in 3.3 exceptions still can be raised when 
> try to emit a warning during shutdown. Is there any way to determine the 
> shutdown mode?

There's nothing obvious, but a possible hack would be:

_is_shutdown = False

def _on_shutdown():
    global _is_shutdown
    _is_shutdown = True

atexit.register(_on_shutdown)

Yeah, I thought about it. Only flag should be false in shutdown mode, because it will be None when a module will be cleaned.

New changeset 50aa9e3ab9a4 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch '3.3':
Issue #19077: tempfile.TemporaryDirectory cleanup is now most likely
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/50aa9e3ab9a4

New changeset d792eb3afa58 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch 'default':
Issue #19077: tempfile.TemporaryDirectory cleanup no longer fails when
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/d792eb3afa58

Thank you for your patch Antoine. And thank you for your excellent idea Richard.