[Python-Dev] PEP 441 - Improving Python ZIP Application Support (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Mon Feb 16 17:42:04 CET 2015

On 16 February 2015 at 16:34, Steve Dower <Steve.Dower at microsoft.com> wrote:

As far as I know, this is identical behaviour to Unix - even to the incredibly annoying (to me) choice of Python 2 as a default. So I reconfigure the default in my personal settings to Python 3. Unix users can do this too (although it may involve a symlink in a ~/bin directory rather than an ini file change). We could also add special-cases for "#!/usr/...python3" in the launcher on Windows.

The launcher handles that. It runs the same thing as "py -3" runs. Which may not be the same as what "py" runs (in my case it runs 3.5a1 where py runs 3.4). Arguably that's an odd choice, but it's simply that I only use "py" in the normal course of events so I only set the "python" default, not the "python3" default.

My point is that on Windows, users typically don't change the executable name they use[1], but rather configure the "python" (or "py") command to do what they want. So I think that on Windows we should follow that convention and execute whatever "python"/"py" execute.

Paul

[1] As usual with anything like this, it's hard to get a sense of what's "typical" so if hordes of Windows users suddenly post saying they routinely use "python2" and "python3" commands, I'll happily concede I'm not the norm here and ask someone to step up and document recommended practices on Windows better, and I'll update the PEP to follow them :-)

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