[Python-Dev] Python-3 transition in Arch Linux (original) (raw)

Benjamin Peterson benjamin at python.org
Thu Nov 4 14:59:45 CET 2010

2010/11/4 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:

The second case was particularly interesting.  These software would change some of their #! to point at the python2 symlink and leave the rest pointing at python.  Note that python-2.7 itself falls into this category as many files in /usr/lib/python2.7 still have "#!/usr/bin/env python" even when installed with "make altinstall".  I can not remember the exact details, but I recall that some of these files were installed with executable permissions which would be bad, but I need to look into this again now things have calmed down...

The packages that did not auto-detect and work with /usr/bin/python2 or /usr/bin/python2.7 mostly required a sed of their shebangs or a patch to any hardcoded /usr/bin/python paths so were easily fixed. A very interesting exercise, indeed - especially the observation regarding software (including python itself) that supports installation under alternate names, but doesn't subsequently ensure use of that name in its shebang lines. I just did a quick grep of Lib in my py3k directory, and it looks like cgi.py is incorrectly set to use "/usr/local/bin/python", while the other files with shebang lines are set to "/usr/bin/env python3" as expected. Tools also had a few discrepancies:  scripts/2to3.py: /usr/bin/env python (necessary, I think - I believe 2to3 is a 2.x only program)

No, I believe distutils is supposed to patch that up, though.

-- Regards, Benjamin

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