Issue 15818: multiprocessing documentation of Process.exitcode (original) (raw)

[I tried to send this as an email to docs@python.org yesterday, but it seems to have gotten eaten, as I don't see the message in the archives.]

Hi all,

The documentation for the multiprocessing module claims:

| Note that the start(), join(), is_alive() and exit_code methods | should only be called by the process that created the process object.

Two problems with this description:

1. "exit_code" should be spelled "exitcode"
2. exitcode is an attribute of the Process class, not a method as claimed, since the underlying method is decorated with @property

Also, aside from the above documentation issues, if it is true that it's not safe to query the exitcode from a separate process, should the exitcode property method include a check like so:

assert self._parent_pid == os.getpid(), 'can only test a child process'

since start(), join(), and is_alive() all perform this check?