Hille,
Regarding the popen/pclose companion bug:
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/64524
I rather suspect they are declared in the headers of all systems on
which one would compile TL nowadays, so my first thought is simply to
remove those declarations altogether from c-std.h.
If someone would like to try a compilation without them, that'd be
good, else I will in due course.
karl