PSA: Debian Stretch, apt-listchanges, and Python 3

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 11:58 AM, Matt Wheeler <m at funkyhat.org> wrote:
> I think the real PSA is "don't mess with the system python(3) version".
>
> So you've managed to fix this issue, but what if there are others? I think
> packages on Debian have a reasonable right to expect that the version of
> python3 in the release is the version they are going to run on if they look
> like `#!/usr/bin/env python3 ...`
>
> Why not simply alias python3 to python3.6 for your user, or make use of
> virtualenvs?

Up until very recently, the system Python has only been the Python 2.
(For a while, it wasn't even 2.7, but I could easily use altinstall
for that.) I have deliberately wanted to use 3.6 for ALL testing, not
just by messing with venvs or shell aliases, in order to enforce
dogfooding on everything (and for consistency); older Pythons are
available as python3.4 and python3.5, but the live python3 has always
been the one built from tip. And even as Debian starts to embrace Py3
internally, this hasn't been a problem.

If your goal is stability, sure. Don't mess with what 'env python3'
runs. But if you want to thoroughly test stuff? That's different.

ChrisA