On Mar 02, 2011, at 03:29 PM, Piotr Ożarowski wrote:
[Allan McRae, 2011-03-02]
But is that not the whole point of adding the /usr/bin/python2 symlink. That way a developer can explicitly use a /usr/bin/python2 or /usr/bin/python3 shebang and have it portable everywhere. At the moment, Debian seems to be the major hold-up on that actually being a reality being the only major distro I could find that does not provide such a symlink.
Do you realize how many (still perfectly usable) scripts written in Python 2.x few years ago (and not modified since then) are out there? Do you realize how much work would it require to fix every single one of them to point to /usr/bin/python2 instead? Even if we'd start checking mdate and change it at build time automatically, there still will be way too many false positives... for no clear gain.
There's no need to require that change. In Debian, /usr/bin/python can continue point to python2 for a very long time. I don't have a problem with adding such a symlink, and I think it should be done by Informational PEP, not Standards Track PEP. Since there will be no Python 2.8, our own build system shouldn't ever be changed to add such a link, but we can recommend it for consistency among distros, which would be free to adopt it or not. -Barry