Inquiry regarding the name of subprocess.Popen class

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:39:09 -0300, Derek Martin <code at pizzashack.org> escribió:

> On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 01:57:26PM +0000, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch wrote:
>> > I would argue that they don't represent processes at all; the object is
>> > a set of files which connect the standard I/O streams of a subprocess to
>> > its parent, and methods to operate on those files.
>>
>> And the process' ID, an attribute with the process' return code, a method
>> to wait until the process is finished and file objects to communicate
>> with the process.
>
> The name popen is an abbreviation of "pipe open" -- the function, and
> the class, open pipes to communicate with another process.  What you
> said is correct; however there are numerous other ways to open
> subprocesses.  The focus of popen is the communication aspect -- the
> opening and control of the pipes -- not the subprocess.  That's the
> key difference between popen() and all the other methods of starting a
> subprocess.

Totally irrelevant here - we are talking about the subprocess module, not the popen C function.

>> > The C library's popen() function, on which this class is based,

No, subprocess.Popen does not use -directly or indirectly- the C popen function. It uses fork or CreateProcess in Windows.

> Note that in all of these links that talk about popen, the focus is on
> opening pipes or file objects, not on subprocesses:
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/popen.html
> http://docs.python.org/lib/os-newstreams.html
> http://us3.php.net/popen
> http://docs.hp.com/en/B9106-90010/popen.3S.html
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s02.html

Again, irrelevant.

> The Linux man page unfortunately copies (verbatim) the FreeBSD man
> page, which gets it wrong.  You can not open a process, but you can
> definitely open a pipe.

(Ok, if it doesn't agree with you, it must be wrong)

Classes represent "things", and class names should be nouns. Functions represent "actions", and their names should be verbs. popen is a good name for a function; Popen is a bad name for a class.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina