[Linux-SIG] Revisit of PEP 394 -- The "python" Command on Unix-Like Systems

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 31, 2017, at 12:34, Petr Viktorin <encukou at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I’d like to discourage the use of naming schemes like `idle2`, `pydoc2`, etc.  That’s a problematic approach, for which -m invocation is much more predictable, albeit less convenient.  We still don’t have a good solution for that, although many have been discussed.  That’s probably outside the scope of PEP 394 too.
> 
> I think that ship has sailed. The unversioned names should switch along with /usr/bin/python, and the versioned ones should be allowed to die along with /usr/bin/python[23]. Improving the -m situation is out of scope.

Definitely, improving -m is out of scope, but I’m not so sure about the location of that ship.  Maybe that should be a distro-specific decision as well.  E.g. some of Debian’s unversioned tools are already shebanged for Python 3, but that also causes problems sometimes.  OTOH, it should only be a relatively small number of scripts that need to make the distinction in their /usr/bin name.

> The other recommendations proposed here are designed so they can be implemented right now, with no bad side effects, but switching /usr/bin/python will break things. I think here it's good to leave the timing up to distros, and to suggest that the distros allow users to override their decisions.

Again, I’d like the recommendations to use MUST, SHOULD, MAY language so readers and implementers of the PEP will be clear in what’s expected of them and their distros.

Cheers,
-Barry

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