[Twisted-Python] Trial __del__ behavior change - intentional?

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 12:58 am, slamb at slamb.org wrote:
>It appears I can't use reference handling to  clean up 
>resources within a trial - the output code apparently keeps  a reference to 
>the stack trace or something until after it's done.  That's too late for me 
>- this resource is essentially a mutex, so if  I have more than one TestCase 
>in a single trial run, my tests don't  work.

I can't speak to the intentionality of that particular change, but there are many cases where code (not necessarily trial) will do something like this temporarily.  You should always treat __del__ as slightly non-deterministic unless you have a very tightly controlled test _specifically_ for your __del__ and it includes a gc.collect().

Do startup / cleanup with the 'setUp' and 'tearDown' TestCase methods.  Don't depend on garbage collection: this goes for both your application and your test code.  Implicitly depending on the garbage collector's behavior will very likely make your program break under the debugger, but not under normal operation (or vice versa).
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