[Python-Dev] Bilingual scripts

[Barry Warsaw]

On May 24, 2013, at 04:23 PM, R. David Murray wrote:

>Gentoo has a (fairly complex) driver script that is symlinked to all
>of these bin scripts.  The system then has the concept of the
>"current python", which can be set to python2 or python3.  The default
>bin then calls the current default interpreter.  There are also
>xxx2 and xxx3 versions of each bin script, which call the 'current'
>version of python2 or python3, respectively.
>
>I'm sure one of the gentoo devs on this list can speak to this more
>completely...I'm just a user :)  But I must say that the system works
>well from my point of view.

Interesting approach, but it doesn't seem to me to be fundamentally different
than the BPOS (big pile o' symlinks).

Over in Debian-land one of the interesting points against a driver script was
that folks like to be able to explicitly override the shebang line
interpreter, e.g.

$ head /usr/bin/foo
#! /usr/bin/python3 -Es
$ python3.4 /usr/bin/foo
...

One other person mentioned they like to be able to execfile() - or the Python
3 moral equivalent - the /usr/bin script, which obvious would be harder with a
sh or binary driver script.

-Barry