While trying to debug a testsuite crash, I discovered that a faulty module from the system wide directories was being picked up. The module in question was sgmlop.so, which was being imported by Lib/xmlrpclib.py. (BTW isn't it considered bad form for a module within the Python distribution to load a third party module?)

In my opinion, the main issue here is that while testing a Python build, no out-of-tree modules should be able to be imported in any case, in order to avoid pollution of the testing environment. Yet AFAICT, there is no place where the sys.path is manipulated to remove the out-of-tree directories. I believe that the proper thing to do would be to allow only the build tree module directories in the search path.

Any comments/patches would be appreciated.


Best Regards,

Theodoros Kalamatianos