Re: Python 3 binaries

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 07:40:18PM +0200, Cyril Roelandt wrote:
> Packages usually exist in two different versions: python-foo and
> python3-foo.
> 
> I think this is quite a good way of packaging both Python 2 and 3.
> One day, maybe nobody will use Python 2.x any more, and we'll just
> use "python" instead of "python3", but until then, I'm really happy
> to have "python" and "python3".

I think it is not compatible with our policy of defaulting to always the
latest version, if possible, while debian usually defaults to something
old and very stable. (I notice that python-3.0 dates from 2008).

So do I understand correctly that you would suggest two packages, python
(containing version 2.x) and python3 (containing version 3.x), and the same
for all modules? Otherwise, having python-2 and python-3, upgrading and
installing without giving a version number would automatically switch
to python-3, and then we would lose the "python" binary.

With a package python (version 2) and a package python3, without a wrapper
package, all our packages containing some #!/usr/bin/python would have to use
Python version 2. Is that what we want?

I think the suggestions with a wrapper package make it easier to switch to
Python 3 wherever possible, while your suggestion, if I understand it
correctly, seems to force us to stay with Python 2 until the last minute.

Worse, if there are packages requiring Python 3 but containing
#!/usr/bin/python (do such programs exist?), we would need to treat them
on a case-by-case basis.

Andreas