Well, ctypes failing because it cannot compile is only when a platform that is not listed as optional cannot import it. So if some platform does not support ctypes then it gets added to the list, end of story.

We only support so many platforms as it is. And with the hg transition, if someone maintains a closed-source fork they can easily patch their own version of Python so that test_ctypes is skipped without issue w/o causing us to not notice when ctypes stops compiling on a platform we do support **and** expect it to be available on.

Anyway, I am going to continue to rip out the (un)expected test skip code regardless of how people come down on whether this is too strict or not on a per-test basis as I still think the expected skip list is worthless as-is. We can then discuss this on python-committers (since we have to maintain the test compatibility).