On 05/12/2011 08:10, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
I agree with Nick that we shouldn't do anything except perhaps
for documentation changes. There are many other environment variables
whose absence could also cause failures to run the executable,
such as PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc. Even not passing DISPLAY may
cause the subprocess to fail starting.
IOW, users should "normally" pass all environment variables, and
only augment it with any specific additions and deletions that
they know are needed for the subprocess. If a user deliberately
passes a small set of environment variables (e.g. none), we must
assume that it was deliberate, and that any resulting failures
are desired. People do such stuff for security reasons, and
side-stepping their enforcement is not appropriate for Python
to do.
Having slept on this I must confess that this is pretty much the
conclusion I'd come to: we can't do anything in code which is
guaranteed to be correct in every case. The best we can do is
document. And, as Martin Packman pointed out (and I had missed),
this particular condition is already documented, at least enough
to point a user to.
We could probably do with a HOWTO (or blog post or whatever) on using
subprocess on Windows, not least because a fair amount of the docs
are Unix-centric and actually very slightly confusing for naive
Windows-based developers.
I think my proposal now is: do nothing. I'm aware that Nick Coghlan
has been making fairly extensive changes to the subprocess docs
recently and I don't I can propose anything on this matter which
amounts to more than shuffling the pieces around.
TJG
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