> Python shouldn't (IMHO) crahs, even if you give bogus input to
> python functions.  

But it doesn't actually crash does it?  It throws an assertion dialog,
which sucks when the machine is unattended - which is why it is a
problem for the buildbots - but otherwise if you hit 'ignore', things
keep working IIUC?

> Making sure that it doesn't crash in the test suite is 
> not enough, I think.

I think it is enough.  The tests are explicitly checking insane input to
these functions but "in the real world" such assertions blowing would
almost certainly be demonstrating a real bug.  pywin32 has a similar
issue - one or 2 tests cause such an assertion failure, but outside of
the test suite, such assertions should always be enabled IMO.  I'd even
advocate the assertions are disabled only for the individual tests known
to throw such errors and enabled for the rest.

Hirokazu Yamamoto's suggestion sounds reasonable too, but still doesn't
change my mind that it *is* reasonable to leave these assertions enabled
in the general case, and thus the idea isn't really necessary IMO.

Martin has the final say on what actually gets accepted though :)