Re: Redirecting standard output

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 03:54:10 +0200
> 
> Hm...  oh!  process.c isn't compiled at all on MS-DOS?

It is, but only its last part, the one outside the "#ifdef subprocesses"
condition.  Which doesn't include start-process and its subroutines,
of course.

And I'm not sure this is the only reason why we have 2 APIs instead of
one.

> Hm.  Shame.  It would have been nice if those two (very similar
> functionality-wise) functions could have been merged somehow...

If you do it, I promise to review the patches and test them.  I myself
don't plan investing such a serious effort in such a central part of
Emacs any time soon.  I think you greatly underestimate the effort
needed here; the amount of #ifdef's in call-process should tell you
something.  (There were much more of these #ifdef's originally, but
Dan's efforts brought them to the current state, which is probably the
absolute minimum.)  Making start-process compile on MS-DOS will need
to introduce an even larger amount of #ifdef's into it, which is
hardly a step into the right direction.

And anyway, I'm not sure your conclusion about these 2 APIs being very
similar is indeed true.  Nor do I see how start-process solves your
problem: it doesn't let you separate stdout and stderr at all, unless
you go through a shell.  What am I missing?