On Mar 03, 2011, at 08:37 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
No, alternatives is really only useful for a very small class of problems [1]_ and [2]_.
Thanks for the clarification. I was on the fence about making the suggestion in the first place. ;)
For this discussion there's an additional problem which is that alternatives works by creating symlinks. Piotr Ożarowski wants to make /usr/bin/python not exist so that scripts would have to use either /usr/bin/python3 or /usr/bin/python2. If alternatives places a symlink there, it defeats the purpose of avoiding that path in the package itself.
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. Cheers, -Barry