P.S. I'm a bit confused about this discussion though, wouldn't adding python2 to the installation be a feature change and as such not something that can be done in a maintenance branch?
Correct. However, IMO, a PEP could propose to break that rule. Having such a proposal may cause rejection of the PEP (or conditional acceptance only if that change is not carried out). If the PEP is accepted, a special case may be special enough to break the rules. In addition, distributions can add all symlinks they like in their packages, even if "make install" doesn't create them. Whether or not *that* is a feature change depends on the distribution policy. For example, for Debian, it would likely be perfectly reasonable to do that in the 2.7 installation, since 2.7 will be a new feature for Debian, anyway. Regards, Martin