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

[Barry Warsaw]

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
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