[Python-Dev] fork or exec? (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Thu Jan 10 12:59:02 CET 2013

2013/1/10 Charles-François Natali <neologix at free.fr>:

Disclaimer: I'm not saying we should be changing all FDs to close-on-exec by default like Ruby did, I'm just saying that there's a real problem.

I changed my mind, the PEP does not propose to change the default behaviour (don't set close-on-exec by default).

But the PEP proposes to add a function to change the default behaviour. Application developers taking care of security can set close-on-exec by default, but they will have maybe to fix bugs (add cloexec=False argument, call os.set_cloexec(fd, True)) because something may expect an inheried file descriptor.

IMO it is a smoother transition than forcing all developers to fix their application which may make developers think that Python 3.4 is buggy, and slow down the transition from Python 3.3 to 3.4. For Ruby: the change will only be effective in the next major version of Ruby, which may be the expected "Ruby 2.0".

Victor

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