I should also mention that if the idea of whitelisting failures
doesn't fly, it can always be changed to be a blacklist of failures
(i.e., ditch 'optional' and only use 'required_on'). But I did it this
way to force people to clearly state on what platforms a test was
expected to be skipped on reactively instead of letting the list
slowly degrade as it already has (bunch of stuff inconsistently listed
in regrtest as it is).

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 10:20, Brett Cannon <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> added the comment:
>
> So os.name is also supported. But the point is that if a platform wants to be considered supported then they need to give us a patch to update the tests to make them acceptable to skip.
>
> As for test_ttk and such, those that have a third-party dependency are still optional no matter what. This change is **only** for modules we expect to always build on certain platfoms (e.g., winreg under Windows or crypt on UNIX systems). I mean do we really think ctypes is optional at this point? In general no, only on select platforms where libffi support is lacking. So having the test skip because of a build failure under OS X (like I had for LLVM 2.8 for a while) should not be left behind but instead be considered a failure as ctypes is **supposed** to be supported under darwin. Extension build failure should not always be considered a non-failure.
>
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> <http://bugs.python.org/issue10966>
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