Python modules breaking python help() behaviour

[Jeff Spaleta]

As seen in association with numpy:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467266

But poking at it a little bit, the module listing functionality seems
to be broken by other modules. At least pygtk2 and possibly
gnome-applets via different exceptions depending on situation from my
own personal testing.

I'll try to track down the ones I'm aware of and get bugs filed, but I
don't have any idea how many individual modules are a problem.  Nor do
I really know if this is a serious problem. How broken has this
functionality been over the bast 2 or 3 releases? No idea. The numpy
issue affects f8 and f9 and devel.

I'm not sure where this falls on the scale importance. But its not
limited to just numpy, and it does affect our default desktop spin, so
I'd thought I'd make everyone aware of it and let maintainers choose
to deal with this or not.  But it would be nice to get an idea of how
widespread the problem is.

I would humbly ask that other maintainers for other python packages
take a moment and do a test of their own package via mock in the
process outlined in comment 8 of that bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467266#c8

1) set up the mock localbuild root
mock -r <whatever_release> init

2) chroot into the root of that mock environment

3) Run the python help module test, which should return clean
python
help()
modules
(Ctrl-D a few times to get back out of the python and chroot sessions)

4) install the module you think is a problem
mock -r <whatever_release> install <py_package>

5) Do step 2 and 3 again see if its a traceback and if there is something is
wonky with the python modules in the installed package or one of its
dependencies.

If someone wanted to script that test (Hey Matt! Hey Seth!) and run
over an entire rawhide tree..that'd be sort of nice.

Note however that this procedure will not catch all the ways exception
handling in modules breaks the python module listing
functionality...since the mock chroot environment make trigger
different exceptions than your running client system.  Isn't this fun?


-jef