[Python-Dev] PEP 394 request for pronouncement (python2 symlink in *nix systems)

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Neil Schemenauer <nas at arctrix.com> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> Does this need a pronouncement? Worrying about the speed of symlinks
>> seems silly
>
> I agree.  I wonder if a hard-link was used for legacy reasons.  Some
> very old versions of Unix didn't have symlinks.  It looks like it
> was introduced in BSD 4.2, released in 1983.  That seems a long time
> before the birth of Python but perhaps some SysV systems were around
> that didn't have it.  Also, maybe speed was more of a concern at
> that time.  In any case, those days are long, long gone.

Actually I remember what was my motivation at the time (somewhere
between 1995-1999 I think) that I decided to use a hard link. It was
some trick whereby if you ran "make install" the target binary, e.g.
"python1.3", was removed and then overwritten in such a way that code
which was running it via "python" (a hard link to python1.3) would not
be disturbed. Then a new hard link would be created atomically.

But it was too clever, and it's long been replaced with a symlink.

Anyway, I don't think anyone is objecting against the PEP allowing symlinks now.

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