Re: Python 3 binaries

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 07:34:03PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> However, my understanding from what Cyril and Brandon said is that users
> may prefer to have it called ‘python3’ by default, so they can install
> both Python 2 and Python 3 in parallel.  Furthermore, they can choose to
> have (say) an alias python=python3 if that’s what they want.
> 
> Based on that, I thought the wrapper would be mostly for internal
> consumption.
> 
> Did I get it right?
> 
> My understanding was that users (really: Python developers) would expect
> to get a ‘python3’ binary when they install the latest, and a ‘python’
> binary otherwise.

My impression was that most people would like to install the latest and
greatest (python 3), but with the binary still called "python".
These people could install python-default (the wrapper, which I would then
expect to be the package that the average user would install).

Developers who want both versions can install python-2 and python-3.

The Debian python policy stipulates the following:
"Python scripts depending on the default Python version (...) or not
depending on a specific Python version should use python (without a version)
as the interpreter name.
Python scripts that only work with a specific Python version must explicitly
use the versioned interpreter name (pythonX.Y)."

Following this policy (which we may or may not do), if we declare Python 3
to be the default python version, then our python-3 package should contain
a binary named "python", and we would have to delete the "python" binary
from the version 2 package and keep only those named "python2" and "python2.7".
And we should, for internal use, create a wrapper package python-default-2...

But indeed, it would be nice to get our python specialists' opinion.

Andreas