Why is w9xpopen.exe bundled with Python 2.7 on Windows?

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/30/2014 10:45 AM, ps16thypresenceisfullnessofjoy at gmail.com wrote:
> Thanks, that's interesting. It seems odd to me that w9xpopen.exe
> (because of its name) is still used on Windows 7,

Yes, the name is confusing. It is not about running on Windows 9X, but 
about running popen on later systems that act like Windows 9X by using 
command.com instead of cmd.com.  I am sure that such systems have to be 
customized one by one, and are only customized by people (corporations) 
with legacy scripts that depend on the peculiarities of command.com

 >  so I can see why it was removed in Python 3.4.

And not before, because we are slow to break Python on old systems.

> Since I don't use the popen function at
> all in my application, I think it should be OK to exclude
> w9xpopen.exe in my py2exe setup script, especially since it's
> suggested in the change log for py2exe 0.6.3
> (http://www.py2exe.org/old/).

That seems reasonable.  Depending on your target audience, it might be 
reasonable to omit it even if you do use popen.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy