On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 15:22, anatoly techtonik wrote:

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 11:10 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

...

Am 20.02.2011 07:43, schrieb anatoly techtonik:

...

Python definitely needs a development Roadmap to avoid things like w9xpopen.exe slipping off radar from release to release. We don't support Windows 9x since Python 2.6. What this file does in 3.x distributions?

http://bugs.python.org/issue2405

Read the report carefully. It can't be removed to support installations that have changed COMSPEC.

What is the percentage of these installations? Is it possible to support them using by 3rd-party package/distribution?

I'm not sure the percentage matters. Someone somewhere may need it now or in the future, and keeping it requires zero effort. Removing it and creating an external distribution requires extra work from someone on python-dev and also on the user's part, which is a losing situation.

Does a modern windows installation actually even *work* if you change COMSPEC to command.com instead of cmd.exe? And why would anyone ever do that? Hey, I have a good idea: python can just ignore COMSPEC and always run cmd.exe. Then you can delete w9xpopen, hooray.

We have a process for that: in version 3.x, we deprecate the feature, and in version 3.x+1, we drop support for it. Since deprecation missed Python 3.2, we can only deprecate in 3.3, and drop in 3.4. As for "always run cmd.exe": we can't, as it's not us who runs cmd.exe, but the CRT (in the popen library function). Regards, Martin