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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Mar 3 00:49:00 CET 2011

On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 3:00 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Am 02.03.2011 23:36, schrieb Jérôme Radix:

No, I don't do it now. But taking like granted the fact that 2.x python will be dead in 5 years and that /usr/bin/python will point to python3 is, imho, a little too optimistic. I don't think Steven said, or assumed, a scope of 5 years - more like a scope of 30 years. In 30 years, Python 2 will surely be dead (as will likely be Python 3). The defensive programming you promote is likely to fail. Many Python 2 scripts are syntactically invalid when interpreted as Python 3, so a version test won't even be executed. With separate python2 and python3 executables, people can have scripts depend on the right binary. In interactive mode, I would like to use /usr/bin/python be the "current" Python binary always (even when Python 4.6 comes along). Python will, interactively, greet me with its version number, and I can adjust. So the idea of /usr/bin/python being reserved for Python 2 strikes me as inconvenient.

+1 on all that.

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

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