[Python-Dev] urllib.browse() issues

[Eric S. Raymond]

Greg Ward <gward@mems-exchange.org>:
> Ooh, that may not work so well because of the need to background X
> browsers.  Ick.

Bingo.  You got it.  That code is a lot smarter than it looks...

>           One could dream up a wild scheme that forks and forks
> and does the backgrounding itself, but what the hell: we're launching a
> big fat hairy *web browser* here, what does it matter if a shell is
> involved to parse the "&"? 

My thinking exactly.  A couple extra parses and forks are nothing.

> Also, the wild variability of "which" across platforms and shells makes
> me wonder if, somewhere out there, there isn't a "which" that fails to
> return true/false on success.  (check check check).  Yes, there is: with
> bash 2.0.3 on Solaris 2.6:

Ugh...
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment
protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while
it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms.
If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it
remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth
century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787
and 1791 states such a thesis.
        -- Stephen P. Halbrook, "That Every Man Be Armed", 1984