Martijn Faassen: The Call of Python 2.8

[Joshua Landau]

On 16 April 2014 01:42, Devin Jeanpierre <jeanpierreda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes. Software included in Arch, and programs installed via distutils,
> will both work correctly under Arch. [...]
>
> I don't like how Arch
> created a situation where it was impossible to support Arch and Debian
> at the same time with standalone Python 2.x programs (due to a missing
> python2 and differing python in Debian).

Let the developers aim at Debian and other mainstream distros and Arch
will clean it up for its own use. Isn't that how it normally works?

This did, however, quickly result in "python2" symlinks, which I think
is extremely good in the long run to have ingrained in people's
habits.

>  I don't like how the
> migration was not communicated sufficiently clearly to users[*], so
> that when they saw weird Python errors, they came to the Python
> community instead of to Arch

That's not expected Arch user behaviour ;).

> I don't like how their new and
> unusual executable naming scheme forced into existence a PEP [1] to
> figure out how to bring Python and Debian into line, and I don't like
> how Debian was forced to do extra work to make life easier for Python
> 2.x developers and resolve problems that only existed because of what
> Arch did.

I don't agree entirely. Arch was early, perhaps earlier than
reasonable, but "python2" was going to be needed soon anyway,
especially since it significantly aids adoption of the
version-prepended names.

> It's worth stating clearly: there is actually no technical benefit to
> changing what the python symlink points to. If we want to do such a
> thing, it is for cultural reasons, and there is no urgency to it. It
> can be done over an extremely long period of time.

This is Arch. The fact that it *can* be done over a long period of
time falls far behind the "cultural reasons" in level of importance.

> [*] One might also ask why they didn't do a phase where python2 was
> python 2.x, python3 was python 3.x, and python was 2.x but also gave a
> warning to upgrade your stuff because the meaning of the symlink was
> changing. There is no good reason. The stated reason was that warnings
> are annoying -- so they broke everything instead of giving warnings. [2]
>
> [2] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-November/105299.html

Thanks for the read; I found it rather entertaining. Apologies about
the #python grief.

I disagree with you about the warnings. Arch is made to move fast and
this is made abundantly clear:

@https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way
> This user-centric design necessarily implies a certain "do-it-yourself" approach to using the Arch distribution. Rather than pursuing assistance or requesting a new feature to be implemented by developers, Arch Linux users have a tendency to solve problems themselves and generously share the results with the community and development team – a "do first, then ask" philosophy. This is especially true for user-contributed packages found in the Arch User Repository – the official Arch Linux repository for community-maintained packages.

If people want to run Arch but don't want the Arch way, then there's
not much we can do about it. Arch isn't going to compromise its
demographic because a different demographic is also using it.