In testing AsyncSSH against Python 3.8, I noticed a large number of the following errors, even though I was properly closing streams before the objects holding them were garbage-collected.

An open stream object is being garbage collected; call "stream.close()" explicitly.

After some investigation, the problem appears to be that closing a stream is not good enough to prevent the error. The check in asyncio doesn't properly handle the case where the stream is closing, but has not fully closed. Here's a simple test program that demonstrates this:

import asyncio

async def tcp_client():
    reader, writer = await asyncio.open_connection('127.0.0.1', 22)

    writer.close()

asyncio.run(tcp_client())

It's possible to avoid this message by awaiting on writer.wait_closed(), but wait_closed() doesn't exist until Python 3.7, making it very difficult to write portable code and still avoid this message.

I think the following change might address this problem:

*** 233,239 ****

  def \_on_reader_gc(self, wr):
      transport = self.\_transport

! if transport is not None:
# connection_made was called
context = {
'message': ('An open stream object is being garbage '
--- 233,239 ----

  
      def _on_reader_gc(self, wr):
          transport = self._transport
!         if transport is not None and not transport.is_closing():
              # connection_made was called
              context = {
                  'message': ('An open stream object is being garbage '

Sorry, I should have said that the change below was in the file asyncio/streams.py.

Yes, I've experienced this bug. We need to fix this in 3.8.1.

New changeset 7ddcd0c by Andrew Svetlov in branch 'master':
bpo-38529: Fix asyncio stream warning (GH-17474)
7ddcd0c

New changeset 7fde4f4 by Miss Islington (bot) in branch '3.8':
bpo-38529: Fix asyncio stream warning (GH-17474)
7fde4f4