Sorry "crash" wasn't the right term. It's just that distutils tests fail.

I ran into that when trying to run unit tests without any environment
variable (see #12401).

$ env -i ./python ./Lib/test/regrtest.py test_distutils
[1/1] test_distutils
test test_distutils crashed -- Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./Lib/test/regrtest.py", line 987, in runtest_inner
  File "/home/henry/code/cpython/Lib/test/test_distutils.py", line 13, in test_main
    test.support.run_unittest(distutils.tests.test_suite())
  File "/home/henry/code/cpython/Lib/distutils/tests/__init__.py", line 29, in test_suite
    __import__(modname)
  File "/home/henry/code/cpython/Lib/distutils/tests/test_archive_util.py", line 33, in <module>
    unittest.TestCase):
  File "/home/henry/code/cpython/Lib/distutils/tests/test_archive_util.py", line 96, in ArchiveUtilTestCase
    @unittest.skipUnless(find_executable('tar') and find_executable('gzip')
  File "/home/henry/code/cpython/Lib/distutils/spawn.py", line 154, in find_executable
    path = os.environ['PATH']
  File "/home/henry/code/cpython/Lib/os.py", line 450, in __getitem__
    value = self._data[self.encodekey(key)]
KeyError: b'PATH'

1 test failed:
    test_distutils
[98227 refs]

Maybe it's not really a problem, and having a system without PATH
defined shouldn't be supported because it's too "weird".