> The deprecations for os.popenN() are still fine, since those
> APIs are not used all that much, and I'm sure that no one can
> really remember what all the different versions do anyway :-)

That's good, because those functions are already gone in Python3 :)

Victor: did you notice that getoutput and friends call os.popen?

The one argument I can see for actually deprecating os.popen is that in general the os module functions are thin wrappers around the corresponding posix functions.  But that is only true in general, and os.popen was never a "thin" wrapper, at least on most platforms.