Issue1175

gc.disable() throws "NotImplementedError: can't disable Java GC".  Can
it just ignore the call instead in order to maintain compatibility?  

Here's the output when run on PyBench:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PYBENCH 2.0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* using Python 2.5b0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./pybench.py", line 938, in <module>
    PyBenchCmdline()
  File "/u/colin/pybench/CommandLine.py", line 346, in __init__
    rc = self.main()
  File "./pybench.py", line 842, in main
    gc.disable()
NotImplementedError: can't disable Java GC

Colin, 
AFAIK there is no way of disabling the garbage collector in Java.
This is documented in the docstring of gc:

>>> import gc
>>> print gc.__doc__
This module provides access to the garbage collector.

enable() -- Enable automatic garbage collection (does nothing).
isenabled() -- Returns True because Java garbage collection cannot be
disabled.
collect() -- Trigger a Java garbage collection (potentially expensive).
get_debug() -- Get debugging flags (returns 0).

Other functions raise NotImplementedError because they do not apply to Java.

>>>

gc.disable() is also used in Jython's Lib:
 * timeit.py - need to fix
 * subprocess.py - apparently this path is not being exercised by
test_subprocess.py, or perhaps it never gets used at all!

In general, we should just fix the offending code, not our gc wrapper,
so I agree in keeping it closed. If we were to have some sort of
compatibility shim, it needs to be of larger scope than just for gc.