fake_filesystem: RuntimeError "dictionary changed size during iteration" under concurrent mkdir

[jfindlay]

[This bug was found, isolated, fixed, and reported by Claude Opus 4.7, with some minor edits by me.]

Describe the bug

Under concurrent faked mkdir calls that share a parent directory, pyfakefs's internal _directory_content listcomp can iterate a directory-contents dict while another thread is inserting into it. On interpreters whose dict implementation detects concurrent mutation (PyPy; CPython in some configurations) this raises RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration. This is distinct from #1317 (which was about use_original thread-locality) — fixing that bug left this one exposed because the regression test for #1317 exercises concurrent faked mkdir calls.

Stack trace (from PyPy 3.10.16, arm64, running pyfakefs.tests.fake_filesystem_unittest_test.UseOriginalThreadSafetyTest as originally authored in #1318, before the test was restructured to sidestep this bug):

File ".../pyfakefs/fake_filesystem.py", line 1523, in <listcomp>
    matching_content = [
RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration

Full trace truncated for brevity; the full trace shows Path.mkdir(parents=True) → _directory_content → the listcomp over directory.contents.items() racing with concurrent .contents[name] = new_child inserts from another thread.

How To Reproduce

The minimal repro requires two threads doing faked mkdir into the same parent dir. With the use_original thread-local fix in place, the following fails reliably on PyPy and may fail intermittently on CPython:

import asyncio
import threading
from pathlib import Path
from pyfakefs.fake_filesystem_unittest import Patcher

def _write(p):
    p.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
    with p.open("w") as cf:
        cf.write("x")

async def _dispatch(p):
    await asyncio.to_thread(_write, p)

async def many(root, n):
    await asyncio.gather(
        *[_dispatch(Path(f"{root}/shared/w{i}/file")) for i in range(n)]
    )

with Patcher() as p:
    p.fs.create_dir("/fake-env")
    asyncio.run(many("/fake-env", 64))

All 64 workers share /fake-env/shared/ as a parent directory, racing to insert their own w{i} child. On PyPy this reliably trips the listcomp race.

Your environment

Observed on:

Darwin arm64 (GitHub Actions macOS runner)
PyPy 3.10.16 [arm64]
pyfakefs 6.3.dev0 (commit 10a5538, thread-local-use-original branch)

Not reliably reproducible on CPython 3.12 on linux but is likely latent there (dict mutation during iteration is undefined; CPython can also raise RuntimeError under load).

[mrbean-bremen]

Probably duplicate of #1191.