Comment 143 for bug 1142213

yeah well. More ifdefs ... not sure I want that. Especially if it is to bypass a bug that is present in only one _minor_ release of glib.

The only advantage of keeping popen is if other (future) versions of glib break, which the suggestion you propose would not prevent either ...

So in the end, gspawn it should be, and gspawn only, I'd say, assuming that upstream is reliable. (especially a low level library such as glib)

And too bad for the systems running with broken glib (in fact, I expect that if it also breaks pidgin, distros would be quite quick at patching glib)