[Python-Dev] Bilingual scripts (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Wed May 29 20:34:18 CEST 2013

On May 28, 2013, at 12:23 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

Note that the Gentoo example also takes into account versions that might act differently based on the interpreter's implementation. So a -python3 suffix may not be enough. Maybe now we're getting into PEP 425 compatibility tag territory.

This is an interesting, unmapped area in Fedora at the moment... I was hoping to talk to Nick and the Fedora python maintainer at our next Fedora conference. I've been looking at how Fedora's ruby guidelines are implemented wrt alternate interpreters and wondering if we could do something similar for python: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Ruby#DifferentInterpretersCompatibility

Very interesting. It was something like this, albeit replacing jruby or mri with something like --py2 or --py3 that I had in mind. However...

I'm not sure yet how much of that I'd (or Nick and the python maintainer [bkabrda, the current python maintainer is the one who wrote the rubypick script]) would want to use in python -- replacing /usr/bin/python with a script that chooses between CPython and pypy based on user preference gave me an instinctual feeling of dread the first time I looked at it but it seems to be working well for the ruby folks.

... it kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies too. I think most scripts wouldn't need this kind of variability though. For example, lsb_release only needs to run with one version of Python, so:

% head -1 /usr/bin/lsb_release #! /usr/bin/python3 -Es

is just fine. I wouldn't want to replace /usr/bin/python with a selectable interpreter (see also PEP 394), but if we had something like /usr/bin/multipy which acted like rubypick for the few, very limited examples where it's needed, then it might be useful to do so.

I would very definitely want to get consensus on the mechanism and api between the various Linux distros here so it works the same on F/RH, D/U, Gentoo and any others.

My current feeling is that I wouldn't use this same system for interpreters which are not mostly compatible (for instance, python2 vs python3). but I also haven't devoted much actual time to thinking about whether that might have some advantages.

Seems like for Python, that would be the most important use case, but maybe I have blinders on for the issue at hand.

-Barry

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