[Python-Dev] PEP 394: Allow the python command to not be installed (and other minor edits) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 28 00:08:37 EDT 2018

On 28 April 2018 at 12:34, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

Um, the PEP has "Unix-Like Systems" in its heading, so discussing the Windows situation seems out of scope to me.

Sorry, I conflated two issues there - while PEP 394 itself is specific to Unix-like systems, my thoughts on where I'd like to take it in the future are mainly informed by my experiences helping to maintain the Python Packaging User Guide these days, where the current platform dependence of "How does a user run Python, pip, and pip-installed Python tools from the command line?" is a frequent source of problems for folks just starting out. (We really don't want to be maintaining separate "Windows instructions" and "everywhere else instructions" indefinitely, but that's where we are currently)

You're one of its authors, so if you really want to keep the paragraph about the anticipated unified future we can keep it (though preferably this should be discussed in the issue, https://github.com/python/peps/pull/630). But I think this PEP is strongest in its guidelines for what distros and sysadmins should do today; I feel that that paragraph encourages hopes about a future that's farther away than most people care to plan, and not at all certain.

After reviewing the specifics of the proposed changes in the PR, I'm fine with dropping any reference to future plans for the unqualified "python" name for now (aside from clarifying how we expect it to work in virtual environments). That accurately reflects the status quo anyway - inside a virtual environment, 'python' has a clear expected meaning (the venv's Python), outside a virtual environment it's thoroughly ambiguous at best.

The real deadline for figuring out the preferred post-Python-3 spelling will be once we decide to bump the major version number again, and that's at least a few years away, even if we eventually decide not to do a Python 3.10.

Cheers, Nick.

P.S. Historically, we hadn't been able to get much real traction with the "py-for-Unix-like-systems" idea, since it wasn't clear what problem, if any, it would solve at the distro level. However, we may have more luck if we're able to position it as a more forward-compatible replacement for explicit references to 'python3' that doesn't conflict with the assumption that python will refer specifically to python2.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20180428/ffef6dba/attachment.html>

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