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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Mar 2 00:57:45 CET 2011

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 3:45 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

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).

I don't recall which side I was on at the time, but now I agree we should try to encourage distros to use python2 for Python 2.x and python for whatever they like to promote.

I think a PEP would help, but in this case I would request that before the PEP gets written (it can be a really short one!) somebody actually go out and get consensus from a number of important distros. Besides Barry, do we have any representatives of distros here?

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list