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

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Jan 10 22:57:30 CET 2013

Charles-François Natali <cf.natali gmail.com> writes:

> How would that sit with the current proposal? I maintain a wrapper, > python-gnupg, > which communicates with the GnuPG process through subprocess. Although there > is > no in-built use of these parameters, users are allowed to pass additional > parameters to GnuPG, and they might use these esoteric GnuPG options. Since you use subprocess, file descriptor passing to gnupg doesn't work since Subproces.Popen changed closefds default to True (in 3.2) (which was the right decision, IMO).

That could always be overcome by passing close_fds=False explicitly to subprocess from my code, though, right? I'm not doing that now, but then I'm not using the esoteric options in python-gnupg code, either.

My point was that the GnuPG usage looked like an example where fds other than 0, 1 and 2 might be used by design in not-uncommonly-used programs. From a discussion I had with Barry Warsaw a while ago, I seem to remember that there was other software which relied on these features. See [1] for details.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

[1] https://code.google.com/p/python-gnupg/issues/detail?id=46

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