Bug report

Bug description:

If the test registers a callback with atexit module, refleak test will consider it a leak.

    def test_refleak(self):
        atexit.register(lambda: None)

This is the root cause of the buildbot failure of #139185. It's a couple of coincidences that caused the seemingly unrelated issue. Basically, clearing the module cache in test_zipimport made the module-level code in rlcompleter, which includes a register to atexit, run more than once.

There are a few possible approaches to fix this, but I did not find the solution that I'm immediately happy with.

I consider this a test framework bug as this should be a valid behavior. The ideal solution is to keep the atexit callbacks before running test in a loop and restore it after. However, atexit does not provide such an interface, public or private. You can either clear it or run it. The callbacks are stored in a state of the interpreter and we don't have any access to it.

Without that, we either need to somehow calculate the allocated memory by atexit, or hope that no one writes a test that writes to atexit. Of course there might be other ways that I did not think of.

CPython versions tested on:

CPython main branch

Operating systems tested on:

macOS

Linked PRs

• gh-139289: Lazy import rlcompleter to fix the refleak #139305
• [3.13] gh-139289: Lazy import rlcompleter to fix the refleak (GH-139305) #139357

• [3.14] gh-139289: Lazy import rlcompleter to fix the refleak #139305 was backported as part of [3.14] gh-138860: Lazy import rlcompleter in pdb to avoid deadlock in subprocess (GH-139185) #139280