The test in this case created a directory structure with files and directories. It also removed read permissions of some of them.
It then calls tor_glob with a path, and expects the result to be null (!result), and that assertion was failing on the builders.
In gdb, I saw that result was an empty list instead of NULL. Looking at tor_glob, what was returned depended on the return code of glob(). In case of GLOB_NOMATCH, it returns an empty list, and in case of GLOB_ABORT, it returns NULL.