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1. The documentation never gives a rationale for deprecating things. To
find out why they are deprecated, you'll typically have to research what
checkins to a code base have been made that added the deprecation, and
perhaps also ask on mailing lists. For the regular developer, the
rationale for deprecation should be irrelevant, as he needs to change
his code to drop usage of the deprecated API, anyway.
2. You really need to read all of the documentation, in particular the
section that talks about stdin,stdout,stderr in
http://docs.python.org/lib/node528.html
In the example, stdin is inherited from the parent process. Read the
documentation to find out how to send data to the first process.
3. It is not true that this is nowhere explained.
http://docs.python.org/lib/node532.html
explains precisely what the semantics of communicate is.