Martijn Faassen: The Call of Python 2.8

[Joshua Landau]

On 15 April 2014 23:18, Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
> On 4/15/14 5:34 PM, Joshua Landau wrote:
>> Arch is on 3.4 *default*.
>>
>>      $> python
>>      Python 3.4.0 (default, Mar 17 2014, 23:20:09)
>>      [...]
>>
> Yeah, that's the wrong way to do it, and they shouldn't have done that.
> "python" needs to mean Python 2.x for a long time.

Why?

The only things that break are things outside of the official repos,
and the vast majority of the user repository works flawlessly. If I
get something from the source, I normally run it explicitly ("python
the_thing") and on the very rare occasion it breaks (when it's 2.x and
uses "python" to mean "python2") I can trivially patch or wrap it, and
file a bug report.

The python = python3 choice of Arch is not what takes up maintenance
time, and it's good to prepare developers ahead of time. That's what
rolling release is all about: getting the best and preparing the rest.