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

Allan McRae allan at archlinux.org
Wed Mar 2 15:54:11 CET 2011

On 03/03/11 00:29, Piotr Ożarowski wrote:

[Allan McRae, 2011-03-02]

But is that not the whole point of adding the /usr/bin/python2 symlink. That way a developer can explicitly use a /usr/bin/python2 or /usr/bin/python3 shebang and have it portable everywhere. At the moment, Debian seems to be the major hold-up on that actually being a reality being the only major distro I could find that does not provide such a symlink. Do you realize how many (still perfectly usable) scripts written in Python 2.x few years ago (and not modified since then) are out there? Do you realize how much work would it require to fix every single one of them to point to /usr/bin/python2 instead? Even if we'd start checking mdate and change it at build time automatically, there still will be way too many false positives... for no clear gain.

Having made the packages using python-2.x code from an entire distribution point at /usr/bin/python2, I have a fair idea of how much work is involved...

And that is exactly why changes need made now so that time is available for transition. Providing the /usr/bin/python2 symlink now means that any future code would be able to point to it rather than some unversioned python binary. That way in ?? years when python-3.x is "the" python and python-2.x is obsolete, and it is decided that /usr/bin/python will be python-3.x (which I believe is the only logical outcome), then everyone will be a lot more prepared.

Allan

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