On 21 April 2015 at 08:15, Barry Warsaw <ba...@debian.org> wrote:
> >For third parties who want to distribute scripts that run out-of-the-box
> >everywhere (installers, cross-platform system management or monitoring
> >scripts, build scripts, etc.), Python 3 isn't an option. If we remove
> Python
> >2 from the default install in Debian, Python 2 ceases to be an option
> too. So
> >they'll start using sh or perl or something, or ship compiled code, both
> of
> >which I think are net negative options.
>
> Do you think that will happen even if Python 2 is just an apt-get away?
Yes. If I'm distributing a script, I don't want to have to tell users "if
you're on Debian newer than X or Ubuntu newer than Y, apt-get install
python first. If you're on Fedora newer than Z...".
If I couldn't rely on either 'python' or 'python3' being present, I might
try to ship Python scripts with a shell wrapper that does something like
this pseudocode:
if (which python3):
python3 my_real_script.py
else:
python my_real_script.py
But that's ugly, and I'd be thinking things like: will the syntax I use
work in plain sh, or only in bash? do all distros have bash? how similar
are the shells 'sh' points to in different distros? I'm sure I could work
it out, but if I need to wrap Python scripts in another language, it's a
disincentive to use Python for this kind of thing.
Thomas
