On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 7:28 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Sure, give it a shot. Looks like subprocess.Popen was intended to replace os.system in any case.
>
> Except that output is not 'real time' with straight Popen, and doing so reliably on every platform (cough - windows - cough) is not completely trivial. You also have to handle buffered output, etc... That code is very fragile, so this would be quite a lot of testing to change, and I am not sure it worths it.

It doesn't have to be "real time". Just use .communicate() and print out the stdout and stderr to their appropriate streams after the subprocess finishes.

Indeed, it does not have to be, but that's useful for debugging compilation issues (not so much for numpy itself, but for some packages which have files that takes a very long time to build, like scipy.sparsetools or bottleneck).

That's a minor point compared to the potential issues when building on windows, though.

David