[arch-general] a plea for python 2

[Thomas Dziedzic]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:19 PM, Sander Jansen <s.jansen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:05 PM, Thomas Dziedzic <gostrc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>> Am 14.12.2011 23:24, schrieb Evan Martin:
>>>> What I don't understand is why you're manually patching upstream
>>>> software to rewrite references from /usr/bin/python to
>>>> /usr/bin/python2.  This sort of forking is exactly the sort of
>>>> divergence (like how Ubuntu modified their GTK to add their own
>>>> specific hooks) that I was fleeing from when I came to Arch.
>>>
>>> There's no forking here. Python 2 is end-of-life, python 3 is current.
>>> Applications that set a 'python' shebang, but require 'python2' are
>>> *broken*, we *fix* them.
>>>
>>
>> This is how I feel about the current situation also.
>>
>> The pep clearly defines that you should only be using python2 or
>> python3 in your shebangs, and that python should be ideally used only
>> to invoke interactive sessions.
>>
>> The fact that programmers and distro python packagers ignore this is
>> not our fault.
>
> "Until the conventions described in this PEP are more widely adopted,
> having python invoke python2 will remain the recommended option."

The full quote is:

"More conservative distributions that are less willing to tolerate
breakage of third party scripts continue to alias it to python2. Until
the conventions described in this PEP are more widely adopted, having
python invoke python2 will remain the recommended option."

Also, when do you suppose "widely adopted" will occur? If you leave
space for interpretation, then expect opinions that don't match yours.
This is a recommendation and someone is going to have to take the
first step eventually.
Here is a metaphor in the spirit of the season:
Arch is the snowplow that is shoveling the snow to the sides of the
road to make it easier for other distros to pass.

I see this thread turning into the threads when it was first
announced, and I refuse to go down that path, again...

Here is the python maintainer's blog post about it:
http://allanmcrae.com/2011/03/the-python2-pep/

Cheers!