[issue10483] http.server - what is executable on Windows

[Glenn Linderman]

Glenn Linderman <v+python at g.nevcal.com> added the comment:

On 11/18/2021 7:36 AM, STINNER Victor wrote:
> STINNER Victor <vstinner at python.org> added the comment:
>
> I searched for open issues which contain "cgi" in their title. I found 43 open issues. The oldest is 101 months ago.
>
> In 10 years, Lib/cgi.py got 43 commits. Only 13 commits in the last 5 years (since 2016-01-01).
>
> It seems like the cgi module is not really maintained anymore. One option is to do nothing: I guess that the most basic features continue to work.
I got the definite feeling 10 years ago that CGI wasn't being 
maintained, at least for Windows use, and that's why I forked it for 
private use and enhancement.  Nothing in the interim has made me change 
my mind, and your statistics support that.  I got the impression that 
most core developers used Unix-variants for their development, and 
likely most CGI users as well, and that Windows use of CGI just wasn't a 
priority for anyone in the core team.  But it has been useful for me, 
and if a little work were put into supporting it, I suspect it could be 
useful to others as well. But as a lowly non-core user unfamiliar with 
the ever-changing processes for submitting patches, I felt rather 
ignored (which apparently isn't an uncommon issue for users like me), 
but neither did I have the time to invest to learn the submission 
protocols, much less to advance to core development status, so I 
realized that it was partly my fault as well.

> Another option is to start deprecating all code related to CGI in the stdlib.
>
> While CGI is not "commonly" used, it seems like it remains popular for specific usages. So I don't think that it's time to deprecate it :-)

Deprecation would certainly be a disservice to the community, as CGI is 
the only (as far as I know) universal service available on pretty much 
all web server implementations.  There are probably better interfaces to 
user-supplied code on many web servers, but the ones I've heard about 
are not as universal, and not as simple for users to implement.

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