Hi, On 2018-11-24 15:49:25 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Jeremy Harris <j...@wizmail.org> writes: > > Trying to set up a buildfarm animal on a RHEL 8.0 (beta) system, > > the build fails early: > > ... > > It appears to be a "configure" script looking for python; and there is > > no such. You can have python3 or python2 - but neither package install > > provides a symlink of just "python". > > Yeah, some distros are starting to act that way, and I suspect it's > causing pain for a lot of people. > > Currently we are agnostic about which python version to use, so if you > don't have anything simply named "python", you have to tell configure > what to use by setting the PYTHON environment variable. > > In a buildfarm configuration file this would look something like > > # env settings to pass to configure. These settings will only be seen > by > # configure. > config_env => { > + PYTHON => "/usr/local/bin/python3", > > There's been some preliminary discussion about starting to default to > python3, but given this project's inherent conservatism, I don't expect > that to happen for some years yet. In any case, whenever we do pull > that trigger we'd surely do so only in HEAD not released branches, so > buildfarm owners will need to deal with the case for years more.
Why don't we probe for python2 in addition to python by default? That ought to make RHEL 8 work, without making the switch just yet. Greetings, Andres Freund