Creating a symlink on Windows needs SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege, which a
normal account does not hold unless Developer Mode is on. GitHub's hosted
Windows runners hold it, so seven unguarded call sites passed in CI and failed
only on a contributor's own machine, with WinError 1314 and no connection to
whatever they were working on:
tests/backend/services/test_audiocpp_backend.py (5)
tests/test_exports_api.py (1)
tests/test_storage_report.py (1)
The repo already knew about this — tests/test_hf_cache_repair.py carries a
private _symlink_or_skip helper whose docstring describes exactly this failure.
The pattern simply never reached the other files, which is the whole class of
the bug: a convention that lives in one module's private helper gets rewritten
from scratch, or forgotten, at every new call site.
So the helper is now a `symlink_or_skip` fixture in tests/conftest.py, and
tests/test_symlink_guards.py walks the AST of every test module and fails on a
raw symlink_to / os.symlink that has no way to skip. Guarded means the fixture,
a try, a skipif marker (module-level pytestmark included), or a test that has
already run a skipping helper — the three legitimate existing patterns, which
it recognises rather than forcing a rewrite.
Coverage is unchanged: the full pytest job runs on Linux, where nothing skips.
Fails before (7 errors, then the guard reports the offending files), passes
after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017ypcgSsh5j2PEonSJiAU1S
