On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 01:56:39PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
I don't agree that /usr/bin/python should not be installed. The draft PEP language hits the right tone IMHO, and I would favor /usr/bin/python pointing to /usr/bin/python2 on Debian, but primarily used only for the interactive interpreter.
Or IOW, I still want users to be able to type 'python' at a shell prompt and get the interpreter.
Actually, my post was saying that these two can be decoupled. ie: It's possible to not have /usr/bin/python while still allowing users to type python at a shell prompt and get the interpreter. This is done by either redefining the PATH to include the directory that the interpreter named "python" is in or by creating an alias for python to the proper interpreter. Using the environment-modules tools is one solution that operated in this way. It also, incidentally, would let each user of a system choose whether python invoked python2 or python3 (and on Debian, which sub-version of those). A more hardcoded approach is to have the python package drop some configuration into /etc/profile.d/ style directories where the distribution places files that are run by default by the user's shell with the default startup files. -Toshio