People choosing Python 3

[Michael Torrie]

On 09/11/2017 06:00 AM, Pavol Lisy wrote:
>> Debian follows PEP 394, which recommends that "python" point to python2,
>> and I don't see that changing any time soon (certainly not before RHEL
>> includes python3 by default.
> 
> Which part of third party ecosystem surrounding Python 3 is not (and
> could not be any time soon) sufficiently mature?

I don't believe it's a matter of maturity. Python 3 is mature now.  It's
a matter of when python 2 disappears entirely as it's about versioning
and backwards compatibility.

Although, I'm not sure I ever want to see /usr/bin/python point to
python3, or python4, or python5.  Maybe better to deprecate
/usr/bin/python altogether and transition to explicit python2, python3,
python4, python5.

Another possibility would be to make /usr/bin/python be a dispatcher,
and require the #! invocation to tell it which version of python the
script requires.  Alternatively a special comment could, similar to how
source file encoding is specified, tell the interpreter which version of
the python language the script uses.

Certainly I don't want to go through the whole question of, "which
version is /usr/bin/python?" every time we get a new major version number.