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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Jan 10 19:30:13 CET 2013

On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:47:23 -0500 Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:

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On 01/10/2013 07:52 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote: > Le Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:59:02 +0100, Victor Stinner > <victor.stinner at gmail.com> a écrit : > >> 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.setcloexec(fd, True)) because >> something may expect an inheried file descriptor. > > Do you have an example of what that "something" may be? Apart from > standard streams, I can't think of any inherited file descriptor an > external program would want to rely on. > > In other words, I think close-on-exec by default is probably a > reasonable decision. Why would we wander away from POSIX semantics here? There are good reasons not to close open descriptors (the 'pipe()' syscall, for instance), and there is no POSIXy way to ask for them not to be closed.

Because Python is not POSIX. (and POSIX did mistakes anyway)

Regards

Antoine.

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