I am running a debian system. And trying to build cpython3.6 from source. 
When I run make altinstall, it failed on test_socket. Reporting cli attribute is missing.

After some trouble shooting, it seems the support.get_unused_port() is not reliable. Then I modified it and return a port I am sure no one is using, the build succeeded.

Could you show the failure message here? And you could make your patch a PR on GitHub.

The error message is just a "Port already used".

Possible cause 1: find_port default interface is HOST, which is 127.0.0.1. And in most test cases, they use 0.0.0.0. So they are on different interface. 

2: system reuse the port, since I build python on a busy server, that is possible.

Another error message:
Unhandled exception in thread started by <bound method ThreadableTest.clientRun of <test.test_socket.NetworkConnectionAttributesTest testMethod=testSourceAddress>>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/python3.6/Python-3.6.0/Lib/test/test_socket.py", line 293, in clientRun
    self.clientTearDown()
  File "/tmp/python3.6/Python-3.6.0/Lib/test/test_socket.py", line 4379, in clientTearDown
    self.cli.close()
AttributeError: 'NetworkConnectionAttributesTest' object has no attribute 'cli'

I am sorry but it is not possible to fix the issue since we don't have enough information to identify or reproduce the bug.

nosy: + vstinner
messages: + msg301908

resolution: out of date
stage: resolved