[Python-ideas] shutil.runret and shutil.runout

[Nick Coghlan]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 12:03 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Nick Coghlan writes:
>
>  > As things stand, Python is a lousy language for system administration
>  > tasks
>
> Yeah, the worst possible sysadmin language except for all the others.
> AFAICT it more than holds its own with distro maintainers, no?

For applications where correctness in all circumstances is the
dominant criterion? Sure.

For throwaway scripts, though, most of the Linux sysadmins I know just
use shell scripts or Perl. For the devops (and deployment automation
in general) crowd, there's no real Python-based competitor to Chef and
Puppet (both Ruby based) (my understanding is that the Python-based
Fabric doesn't play in *quite* the same space as the other two).

As things currently stand, Python deliberately makes it hard to say "I
want my individual commands to be shell commands, but I also want
Python's superior flow control constructs to decide which shell
commands to run". For an application, that's a good thing. For
personal automation, it's not.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia