[Python-Dev] Support the /usr/bin/python2 symlink upstream

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 3:45 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>>> I believe we agreed at the language summit last year (or maybe even the
>>> year before) that "python" would always be python2.x, and "python3"
>>> would be python3.x.
>>>
>>> And by "always" we indeed meant forever. To do otherwise would break
>>> scripts even many, many years from now.
>>
>> It sounds like the distributions aren't going to cooperate with us.
>> Arch has already switched.  Gentoo will allow the user to switch
>> /usr/bin/python to point to python3, and I suspect this will become
>> the default at some point.
>>
>> I'm not sad about that, myself.
>
> Neither am I. I personally also disagree with the decision taken at
> the language summit (and believe that the language summit is no place
> to make such decisions).

I don't recall which side I was on at the time, but now I agree we
should try to encourage distros to use python2 for Python 2.x and
python for whatever they like to promote.

I think a PEP would help, but in this case I would request that before
the PEP gets written (it can be a really short one!) somebody actually
go out and get consensus from a number of important distros. Besides
Barry, do we have any representatives of distros here?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)