[Python-Dev] fork or exec?

[Vinay Sajip]

Charles-François Natali <cf.natali <at> 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 close_fds 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