[Python-Dev] Bilingual scripts

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 01:22:01PM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On May 27, 2013, at 11:38 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> >- If upstream doesn't deal with it, then we use a "python3-" prefix.  This
> >    matches with our package naming so it seemed to make sense.  (But
> >    Barry's point about locate and tab completion and such would be a reason
> >    to revisit this... Perhaps standardizing on /usr/bin/foo2-python3
> >    [pathological case of having both package version and interpreter
> >    version in the name.]
> 
> Note that the Gentoo example also takes into account versions that might act
> differently based on the interpreter's implementation.  So a -python3 suffix
> may not be enough.  Maybe now we're getting into PEP 425 compatibility tag
> territory.
> 
<nod>  This is an interesting, unmapped area in Fedora at the moment... I
was hoping to talk to Nick and the Fedora python maintainer at our next
Fedora conference.

I've been looking at how Fedora's ruby guidelines are implemented wrt
alternate interpreters and wondering if we could do something similar for
python:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Ruby#Different_Interpreters_Compatibility

I'm not sure yet how much of that I'd (or Nick and the python maintainer
[bkabrda, the current python maintainer is the one who wrote the rubypick
script]) would want to use in python -- replacing /usr/bin/python with a
script that chooses between CPython and pypy based on user preference gave
me an instinctual feeling of dread the first time I looked at it but it
seems to be working well for the ruby folks.

My current feeling is that I wouldn't use this same system for interpreters
which are not mostly compatible (for instance, python2 vs python3).  but I
also haven't devoted much actual time to thinking about whether that might
have some advantages.

-Toshio
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