[Distutils] expected non-zero return values when spawning subprocesses

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 08:41 PM 1/20/2006 -0500, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>Hi there,
>
>I'm using distutils.spawn.spawn() to run subprocesses during my
>build commands. It now happens that one of those subprocesses will
>return a non-zero value that doesn't strictly correspond to an error,
>and thus I'd like to catch it from within my python code.
>
>It appears spawn() itself will raise a message containing a stringified
>version of the exit code, but not the exit code itself. This seems to
>imply that, in order to discriminate on the exit value, I have to
>catch DistutilsExecError, and then parse the string. This seems rather
>unelegant. Is there some better way ? Could the exception be modified
>to contain the original code (as an integral value) ?

The answer to both questions is "probably not".  The distutils haven't been 
under active development for some time now.  You could perhaps try and 
submit a patch via the Python Sourceforge patch tracker; perhaps that might 
get a more authoritative response one way or the other.