[Python-Dev] Python-3 transition in Arch Linux

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 04, 2010, at 02:44 PM, Allan McRae wrote:

>While this is not strictly related to python development, I thought that
>developers of python might be interested in some of the lessons provided by
>this. So forgive me if this is really wrong for this list...
>
>Recently Arch Linux did a big transition with respect to python.  Now we
>support two python packages: "python" and "python2".

Very cool to hear about this first hand, thanks for posting it Allan.  I was
recently at the Ubuntu Developers Summit and Arch Linux's transition was a
source of several hallway discussions.  It's good to read about your work and
successes in blazing that trail.

>I really do not want to debate the sanity of pointing /usr/bin/python at
>python-3.x here, but it suffices to say that I am of the opinion that if
>python-3.x is really the future of python, then /usr/bin/python must
>eventually point to a 3.x version.  Also, Arch Linux is very bleeding edge
>and we expect our users to be competent enough to deal with thing like this.
>According to #python, we are all idiots....  And I have been (figuratively)
>yelled at by a couple of Debian developers (which is incidentally the only
>major distro I found without a /usr/bin/python2 symlink).

Ah too bad, no one needs to yell :).  It's an interesting discussion topic
though and it's something I think other distros should start considering.  In
Ubuntu 11.04, we'll have Python 3.1 and 3.2, 2.6 and 2.7, with the default
(i.e. /usr/bin/python) either at 2.6 (probable) or 2.7 (possible).  `python3`
currently points to 3.1.2, but we've talked about getting that to 3.2 for this
cycle.

Ubuntu's next Long Term Support release is scheduled for April 2012.  It's an
ambitious but worthy goal to see if we can transition to Python 3 as the
default Python by then.

-Barry
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