On Sep 15, 2013, at 06:05 PM, Steve Langasek wrote: >And *once that happens*, we can discuss resurrecting /usr/bin/python and >pointing it to python3. It should not change until then. Python 2.7 will have an upstream lifetime of many years even from now. The current thinking (I wouldn't even call it a "plan" at this point) is that we transition 2.7 into security-only source-only mode around the Python 3.5 time frame. A rough approximation puts that around Summer/Fall 2015. After that, I'm confident that 2.7 will get upstream security fixes for at least 3 more years. So really, you're talking about EOL'ing 2.7 no earlier than 2018. (Contrast that with 2.6 which I will gladly drive the final nail in next month. ;) >> See PEP 394 <URL:http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/>. > >It's not the first or last time that an upstream has made a poor >recommendation that Debian rightly ignores. Please note that I think there's been some confusion about PEP 394, which recent rewording has hopefully clarified. This PEP is *not* recommending that /usr/bin/python point to Python 3, it simply acknowledges that some distributions have done this. In fact, the PEP explicitly recommends that "/usr/bin/python refer to the same target as python2" (yes, "for the time being" but still). Probably the most controversial bit in the PEP for this group is the recommendation that "python should be used in the shebang line only for scripts that are source compatible with both Python 2 and 3". IMHO, having scripts (as opposed to libraries) be bilingual is rather silly, so take this recommendation with a grain of salt, but for maximum portability with other OSes, use python2 or python3 explicitly. And yay, you'll be able to do that starting in Jessie although the build-tools won't support 'python2' in shebang lines. That doesn't seem like such a big deal to me because the build tools are specifically for building packages intended to work on Debian, not for building cross platform scripts. -Barry
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