[Python-Dev] Support the /usr/bin/python2 symlink upstream (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Wed Mar 2 00:45:51 CET 2011

I believe we agreed at the language summit last year (or maybe even the year before) that "python" would always be python2.x, and "python3" would be python3.x.

And by "always" we indeed meant forever. To do otherwise would break scripts even many, many years from now. It sounds like the distributions aren't going to cooperate with us. Arch has already switched. Gentoo will allow the user to switch /usr/bin/python to point to python3, and I suspect this will become the default at some point. I'm not sad about that, myself.

Neither am I. I personally also disagree with the decision taken at the language summit (and believe that the language summit is no place to make such decisions).

Regards, Martin

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