Heads up with Drupal 7 tests

A heads-up to my fellow developers. I ran into this problem on Lighty, but it probably is going to occur on all non-Apache server daemons, so I'm cross-posting this to the Nginx and IIS groups too.

I'm starting to get serious about D7 development. For the last couple days, though, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why some tests related to paths weren't testing - specifically the tests under "Paths" > "Path alias functionality." These are just the tests relevant to what I'm trying to fix, so it was rather frustrating that I couldn't get them to pass even on a virgin CVS pull and database, even though they pass just fine on Drupal's testing bots. Gradually, I began going over the variables between Drupal's configuration and mine, until just tonight I finally stopped to consider - oh, dammit - the web server.

Though I'm using my Lua script to do clean URLs, I decided to try disabling clean URLs and running the tests again - perhaps Drupal's tests were expecting things to happen in an Apache-specific way. Sure enough, the tests then passed. Glory be!

Experimenting, though, I found that there appear to be many other tests which don't pass on Lighty. Indeed, when I try to run the full test suite, the system grinds through the first few tests (reporting many failures), then the Batch API process hangs - the browser stops fetching new updates and the progress bar hangs. Again, since these tests pass on the (presumably) Apache-powered test bots, I can only assume that Lighty is the difference.

So are these tests failing for everyone, or is it just you? Looks like odds are that it's just you - or rather you and everyone else who's stubborn about not using Apache.

Could any of the folks running on Nginx or IIS try running D7's tests and let us know how they turn out? If you're afraid of CVS, you can grab an alpha release tarball here.