[Python-Dev] PEP 441 - Improving Python ZIP Application Support

[Steve Dower]

Paul Moore wrote:
> On 15 February 2015 at 18:25, Petr Viktorin <encukou at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On POSIXy systems the "python3" symlink is created in all venvs. I
>> thought (perhaps naïvely) that Windows doesn't do shebangs natively,
>> so there's some Python-specific mechanism around them, which should
>> handle "python3".
> 
> Windows doesn't have "python2" or "python3" commands, just "python".
> To choose which version you use, set PATH or use an explicit path to the
> executable.
> 
> The launcher offers shebang handling for scripts, and special-cases the
> following values for Unix compatibility:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/env python
> #!/usr/bin/python
> #!/usr/local/bin/python
> 
> They default to the "default Python" which is normally the latest Python 2
> version available, but which can be configured by the user.
> They also support adding an explicit version (python2, python3, python2.7,
> python3.4, ...)
> 
> As far as I know, this is *identical* behaviour to Unix - even to the incredibly
> annoying (to me) choice of Python 2 as a default. So I reconfigure the default
> in my personal settings to Python 3. Unix users can do this too (although it may
> involve a symlink in a ~/bin directory rather than an ini file change).

We could also add special-cases for "#!/usr/...python3" in the launcher on Windows.

Cheers,
Steve