The new std.process is ready for review

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2013 06:31:19 -0500, Lars T. Kyllingstad  
<public at kyllingen.net> wrote:

> It's been years in the coming, but we finally got it done. :)  The  
> upshot is that the module has actually seen active use over those years,  
> both by yours truly and others, so hopefully the worst wrinkles are  
> already ironed out.
>
> Pull request:
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/1151
>
> Code:
> https://github.com/kyllingstad/phobos/blob/std-process2/std/process2.d
>
> Documentation:
> http://www.kyllingen.net/code/std-process2/phobos-prerelease/std_process2.html
>
> I hope we can get it reviewed in time for the next release.  (The wiki  
> page indicates that both std.benchmark and std.uni are currently being  
> reviewed, but I fail to find any "official" review threads on the  
> forum.  Is the wiki just out of date?)

I just reread the docs, considering Vladimir's point about  
space-containing no-arg programs.  I agree there is a problem.

We need to not get rid of the single program version of spawn, we need to  
simply interpret it as a no-arg program.

To have this not work:

spawnProcess("c:/Program Files/xyz/xyz.exe");

and require this instead:

spawnProcess("c:/Program Files/xyz/xyz.exe", []);

is not very intuitive.

It reminds me of when we had writefln and not writeln, in order to print  
out a string with % in it, you had to do writefln("%s", "%s");

Now, I think we have an additional issue in that it's difficult to take a  
string argument with parameters in it, and pass it in one line:

string executeThis = "prog arg1 arg2";
auto params = split(executeThis);
spawnProcess(params[0], params[1..$]);

It would be nice to just be able to do this:

spawnProcess(split(executeThis));

I think we need an overload for that, especially if we get rid of the  
auto-splitting of commands.  It should assert if the array is empty.

-Steve