Dave Abrahams added the comment:
@r.david.murray: did you try running my test? I think it shows that we are pretty darned close to fully portable. I believe we could fix Popen to make it fully portable pretty easily. In fact, there may be a pure-python fix. Documenting the differences would also not be hard. I would discourage you from relying *solely* on a description such as "uses execvpe on POSIX" to describe the semantics. Aside from being a nonportable description, it doesn't help anyone who isn't familiar with the POSIX system calls.
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Python tracker
http://bugs.python.org/issue8557
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