Python, os.fork(), webbrowser and debbugs

Gustavo writes about python, it’s webbrowser module, os.fork and parsing bugreports from our BTS via html. This all sound very familiar, so here are some hints from me:

You don’t have to fork a new process just to call a browser, try threading instead: thread.start_new_thread(webbrowser.open, (url,)). No need to clean up the child process after it has finished, just call start_new_thread with the function and it’s parameters and forget it.
Python’s webbrowser module is nice, but it often fails to find the right browser. The problem is to find the users (read: not the system’s) default browser across the different desktop environments. xdg-open from the package xdg-utils (from freedesktop.org) seems to do a very good job. ~~Rng doesn’t use it yet, but I’m definitely planning to replace the webbrowser call with xdg-open.~~ Rng uses it and falls back to python’s webbrowser.open()-call if xdg-open failed.
If your project suffers from changes in the html code of our BTS, try SOAP instead. It provides all the infos in machine readable format and also comes with backwards compatibility: the namespace for debbug’s SOAP interface is Debbugs/SOAP which always calls the latest versions of the remote functions. But you can also use Debbugs/SOAP/V1 (Version 1 currently matches Debbugs/SOAP). This will ensure that changes in debbugs SOAP interface don’t affect your implementation.