> then we should perhaps instead consider the rewrite for 3.6: provide a *new* distutils function that does use Popen and does things "right" (based on everything we've learned since distutils was written), leaving the old function in place, deprecated, for backward compatibility.

Was any progress made towards achieving this? It's frustrating that the correct quoting behavior we get with `subprocess.Popen(List[str])` is not used by `spawn`, and now every level of distutils code has to think about whether it needs to quote its arguments for the shell.