[cturner]

    > For some reason, all of the ways to spawn a subprocess
    > in Python have tried to map almost directly to the
    > underlying C API

I think both are good and necessary. One of the strengthes of python is that if you have a copy of Stevens you can usually work out how to do something in Python. And this is awesome. I've written things on top of unix that in times past would have been written in C. However, that mechanism is usually not very "pythonic".

In the early days python had a principle that there should be one way to do things. You don't hear this so much any more: we're long past that now, with some things different between 2.6 and 2.7 (arg handling), and with multiple broken libraries in the stdlib. When you're working on your own computer and your own time with root access you can always hand-roll outcmes. But it's common to have to deal with a spread of python's and cater to the most obsolete version. Yet I suspect some people still aspire to the one-way-to-do-it, and pretend it's true.

I think we should dump the principle.

A good example of why compromise is not the right outcome is the curses library - it's not quite Stevens, but it's not friendly either. It's hard to do good work with the curses library. We'd be better off if there was (1) a close curses mapping to the C ncurses mechanisms and (2) a nice-to-use abstraction layer that hid far more away from you.