The changes from http://bugs.python.org/issue10197 caused subprocess.getstatusoutput() to start returning a subprocess returncode style status for the child process instead of a POSIX style status.

before that bug's changes:

>>> getstatusoutput("exit 1")[0]
256
>>> getstatusoutput("kill -TERM $$")[0]
15

after that bug's changes:

>>> getstatusoutput("exit 1")[0]
1
>>> getstatusoutput("kill -TERM $$")[0]
-15

This behavior was entirely untested so it was missed when fixing issue10197.

Given the new behavior has shipped in a stable Python release starting with (I believe) 3.3.4 and all 3.4 releases I do not think it should be changed.

But we should document it with proper versionchanged notices.

Workaround: To determine the behavior of the interpreter your POSIX program is running under rather than a hard coded patch level version check, write appropriate conditional code to perform a test such as:

_returns_new_status = subprocess.getstatusoutput('kill $$')[0] < 0

documentation updates as part of issue22635.