bpo-42041: Clarify how Windows path search affects virtual environments #22715
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I've added the "skip news" label as this is simply a docs clarification. |
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Updated based on discussions on the tracker. |
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@vsajip Are you OK with the revised version? |
Doc/library/subprocess.rst
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| @@ -356,6 +356,15 @@ functions. | |||
| arguments for additional differences from the default behavior. Unless | |||
| otherwise stated, it is recommended to pass *args* as a sequence. | |||
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| .. warning:: | |||
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| Using the string ``"python"`` as the program to execute is not a good | |||
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I personally feel like we should not single out python executable because wouldn't the same apply with any other program? IMHO we should point out that on Windows non-absolute path executables don't resolve by using the PATH environment variable and as such we encourage users to pass executables as absolute paths. And then we can mention to use shutil.which if they want a discover executable using the PATH environment variable, and in particular if they want to execute a script with the running python sys.executable. Wouldn't that be more accurate and general?
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It will only apply to anything inside the same directory as python.exe, which is basically just python. In a venv, it's also anything that installed a script wrapper, so pip or virtualenv, among others.
That said, it's been "broken" for 2-3 full releases now (depending on how you count), and the only issues I've heard of were people who thought "python" would be found on PATH. So I don't think switching it back is super important. Arguably, we made it closer to "search PATH".
| @@ -356,6 +356,25 @@ functions. | |||
| arguments for additional differences from the default behavior. Unless | |||
| otherwise stated, it is recommended to pass *args* as a sequence. | |||
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| .. warning:: | |||
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Can you also change os.execvp to os.execvpe at the beginning of the Popen docs?
Also, further down in the cwd section it claims "In particular, the function looks for executable (or for the first item in args) relative to cwd if the executable path is a relative path". That should be changed to restrict it to just POSIX. You could change "In particular" to "In POSIX".
…GH-22715) Clarify in the subprocess documentation how searching for the executable to run works, noting that ``sys.executable`` is the recommended way to find the current interpreter.
https://bugs.python.org/issue42041