[Zope-Coders] problem with Zope.App.startup

[Jeremy Hylton]

I'm having trouble running the tests this morning.  I ran the tests
after a few changes to ZODB.DB.DB and saw a couple of apparently
unrelated failures in ZPublisher's xmlrpc tests.  The tests were failing
because dumps() didn't take an allow_none argument, which was
surprising.

I did a cvs update and tried to reproduce the failure.  Now I can't even
get the tests to import:

localhost:~/src/Zope> python test.py -bvv ZPub
/usr/local/bin/python setup.py  build_ext -i
running build_ext
running build_ext
running build_ext
[14241 refs]
Running unit tests at level 1
Running unit tests from /home/jeremy/src/Zope
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 813, in ?
    process_args()
  File "test.py", line 803, in process_args
    bad = main(module_filter, test_filter, libdir)
  File "test.py", line 622, in main
    runner(files, test_filter, debug)
  File "test.py", line 542, in runner
    s = get_suite(file)
  File "test.py", line 450, in get_suite
    mod = package_import(modname)
  File "test.py", line 442, in package_import
    mod = __import__(modname)
  File
"/home/jeremy/src/Zope/lib/python/ZPublisher/tests/testBaseRequest.py",
line 4, in ?
    Zope.startup()
  File "/home/jeremy/src/Zope/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py", line 46, in
startup
    _startup()
  File "/home/jeremy/src/Zope/lib/python/Zope/App/startup.py", line 54,
in startup
    DB = configuration.dbtab.getDatabase('/', is_root=1)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'getDatabase'

I was worried that some of my recent changes to ZODB were to blame, but
I reverted them and still see the same problem.

It looks like configuration is DefaultConfiguration, which defines dbtab
to be None.  It looks like that's intentional, but then I can't figure
out how a call to Zope.startup() should work.

Jeremy