[docs] [issue8557] subprocess PATH semantics and portability

[Dave Abrahams]

Dave Abrahams <dave at boostpro.com> added the comment:

R. David Murray wrote:
> There are two questions here: (1) is this behavior consistent across all microsoft platforms we support?  

I'll be honest: I don't know.

> (2) is this *change* in behavior of Popen acceptable?

I don't know that either.

> I'll be more inclined to
> test things if the tests are in the form of unit tests, which should
> be much easier to understand than your test program.

I guess no good deed goes unpunished ;-)

I also guess that whether you think unit tests will be easier to
understand depends on what kind of information you expect to glean
from the code.  My script was designed to probe for all
inconsistencies between ‘doze and POSIX behaviors, and it is more
revealing in that respect than a unit test would be.  The unit test
that would prompt the particular code change I'm suggesting would look
more like:

    put directory X in the env argument's PATH (but not in os.environ)
    attempt to launch X/some_executable as simply “some_executable”
    assert that X/some_executable actually ran

I don't know what Popen's unit tests look like, and to be honest,
right now I just don't have any more time to pour into this particular
issue.  Even if it doesn't get fixed in Python I'm going to be using
my wrapper for uniformity.  I hope everything I've done so far is
useful to the community but if not, I still have what I need.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue8557>
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