[Guido van Rossum, 2011-03-02]
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 4:56 AM, Piotr Ożarowski <piotr@debian.org> wrote:
[Sandro Tosi, 2011-03-02]
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 10:01, Piotr Ożarowski <piotr@debian.org> wrote:
I co-maintain with Matthias a package that provides /usr/bin/python symlink in Debian and I can confirm that it will always point to Python 2.X. We also do not plan to add /usr/bin/python2 symlink (and I guess only accepted PEP can change that)
Can you please explain why you NACK this proposed change?
it encourages people to change /usr/bin/python symlink to point to python3.X which I'm strongly against (how can I tell that upstream author meant python3.X and not python2.X without checking the code?)
But the same is already true for python2.X vs. python2.Y. Explicit is better than implicit etc. Plus, 5 years from now everybody is going to be annoyed that "python" still refers to some ancient unused version of Python.
I don't really mind adding /usr/bin/python2 symlink just to clean Arch mess, but I do mind changing /usr/bin/python to point to python3 (and I can use the same argument - "Explicit is better than implicit" - if you need Python 3, say so in the shebang, right?). What I'm afraid of is when we'll add /usr/bin/python2, we'll start getting a lot of scripts that will have to be checked manually every time new upstream version is released because we cannot assume what upstream author is using at given point. If /usr/bin/python will be disallowed in shebangs on the other hand (and all scripts will use /usr/bin/python2, /usr/bin/python3, /usr/bin/python4 or /usr/bin/python2.6 etc.) I don't see a problem with letting administrators choose /usr/bin/python (right now not only changing it from python2.X to python3.X will break the system but also changing it from /usr/bin/pytohn2.X to /usr/bin/python2.Y will break it, and believe me, I know what I'm talking about (one of the guys at work did something like this once)) [all IMHO, dunno if other Debian's python-defaults maintainers agree with me] -- Piotr Ożarowski Debian GNU/Linux Developer www.ozarowski.pl www.griffith.cc www.debian.org GPG Fingerprint: 1D2F A898 58DA AF62 1786 2DF7 AEF6 F1A2 A745 7645