On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 09:53:41PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > Lachlan <lachlan...@gmail.com> writes:
> > i'm not an expert by any means but i fail to see how this is an issue? > In short: Debian is not the only Unix-like system where Python is > installed, and consistency across operating systems is valuable. Yes, it is, which is what makes the Arch devs' change to make things *inconsistent* by pointing /usr/bin/python to python3 an unforgivable screwup. /usr/bin/python is an interface for python2. Having this change over time to point to something incompatible, such as python3, is Evil Bad Wrong. We are now in the situation that we have to ship /usr/bin/python2 for compatibility with scripts originating from Arch, but that in no way implies that /usr/bin/python should be changed to python3. Repurposing /usr/bin/python should only happen following an intervening release in which python2 is not shipped *at all*. > > -Everyone wrote scripts for python 2.x using /usr/bin/python > And eventually Python 2 will be long obsolete. And *once that happens*, we can discuss resurrecting /usr/bin/python and pointing it to python3. It should not change until then. > > -With python3, scripts were written specifically for python3 using > > /usr/bin/python3 > Not all of them, and the expectation is that more and more systems will > assume “/usr/bin/python” is the current version of Python. Who expects that? Arch is negligible. Debian and Ubuntu are not going to make this change. What other OSes are making the ill-conceived change to /usr/bin/python? > See PEP 394 <URL:http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/>. It's not the first or last time that an upstream has made a poor recommendation that Debian rightly ignores. Enabling /usr/bin/python2 compatibility benefits our users, yes. Promoting its use, or making /usr/bin/python incompatible with the many existing scripts running on older Debian releases, does not. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
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