[arch-general] An archlinux-python package for managing system default python version?

[Martti Kühne]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 2:51 PM, Chi Hsuan Yen <yan12125 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Arch enthusiasts,
>
> The package extra/java-runtime-common provides a convenient script
> archlinux-java to handle co-existing JDK/JRE versions. I can use it to
> switch between different versions of java implementations to accomplish
> numerous tasks from testing the compatibilities of my programs to running
> third party applications targeting on different platforms. Now I hope
> there's also a simple script for the same thing but for python. On the


Python actively encourages you to write the python shebang explicitly
either #!/usr/bin/env python2 or #!/usr/bin/env python3 for scripts
that are not compatible with one of them. It is no longer practical to
make any assumptions about the python version in the (unversioned)
python binary, therefore your argument about java doesn't hold. Since
the developers themselves support this conclusion [0], there is no
reason to still have the symlink and hence we should actually abolish
it completely, which I expect to happen in the long run.

[0] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/