subprocess module is sorely deficient?

[Paul Boddie]

On 23 Apr, 13:17, Harishankar <v.harishan... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 Apr 2008 15:11:21 Ben Kaplan wrote:
> > I don't know about all Linux distros, but my Ubuntu machine (8.04 Beta),
> > has the 'TERM' (xterm) and 'COLORTERM' (gnome-terminal) keys in os.environ.
> > You might be able to use that to ensure that the terminal is installed, but
> > you should probably look at a couple of other popular distros first to make
> > sure that the key is there.
>
> This is set on Debian too. Thanks. I should be able to use this environment
> variable on most Linux distributions, I suspect.

Here on RHEL 4, COLORTERM has an empty value. I suppose that the
freedesktop.org standards should cover this kind of thing, and there
are some scripts out there which attempt to provide cross-desktop
support on Free Software desktops:

http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/XdgUtils

Similarly, the desktop module should provide support for various
desktop features, but opening command line windows or terminals isn't
yet possible:

http://www.python.org/pypi/desktop

It'd be interesting to know if we could find out (or make up) reliable
ways of opening the user's preferred terminal application.

Paul