Sorry, after reading the original issue carefully, I realize that my issue is slightly different. In my case running test_idle only crashes, and it crashes before the first test in test_idle, not in test_writelines.
I copied the Arch Linux packaging script mentioned by Eli [2], modified it so that test_idle, test_tk and test_ttk_guionly are not skipped, and added a dependency ttf-font. With the modified PKGBUILD, the only failing test is test_ssl. I guess the issue has been fixed.
Erich Eckner, could you still reproduce the original crash?
[1] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/python2 |