Hi Nick,

2017-11-14 11:07 GMT+01:00 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com>:
On 14 November 2017 at 16:47, Michel Desmoulin <desmoulinmichel@gmail.com> wrote:
Proposal A:
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Suffix Python executable on Windows like on Unix, so that people will
type pythonX.X if they want a specify version.

Pros: easy and discoverable.

Cons: you need a lot of stuff in the system path.

Con: we hope to have the problem resolved on the Linux distro side such that "python" typically means "python" by the time community support for Python 2 ends in 2020. Since Windows has gone the better part of two decades without version Python commands, adding them because we're impatient with the pace of change at the Linux distro level doesn't really make sense (especially when Linux holds such a small fraction of the non-phone client device market).

Perhaps I could sell you on the idea of a Windows "python3" executable, not as the New Official Way to do things,
but rather as a pragmatic measure to make code from those Linux weirdos ;-)  more likely to work on Windows.

I would like to compare it with the strings/bytes-for-pathnames issue: the official recommendation is to use strings
everywhere, problems with round-tripping arbitrary not-valid-UTF8 filenames on POSIX have been solved now.
Still, POSIX people continued to use bytes, so a pragmatic change was to make so that bytes now also work
reliably as pathnames under Windows.

Similarly, even when all Linux distributions have switched to python==python3, people will probably still read and write
tutorials with python3 in it, and perhaps we should accommodate that.

Otherwise I am +1 on your proposal C: if anything this thread has made it clear that there is so much variety in
third-party Python installers, not just Linux distributions, but also things like Anaconda, that it seems unreasonable
to require that the official Python documentation covers all those situations.

Stephan