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I recommend to reject this patch. Apparently, still nobody
has contributed code to support this on NT; I believe you'd
need to use CreateProcess(Ex?) to make it work, which is not
exposed anywhere in standard Python.
Furthermore, I don't like the posix approach, either. There
is no guarantee that the next open will assign fd 1 again.
If the assertion fails, I bet that spawn() will not raise a
Distutils error, as it should. Instead, funny things may
happen due to the AssertionError being raised.
Instead, the right way probably is to use
os.open/os.dup2/os.fdopen.