Re: python / python3 3 pybuild and bin script

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel <frederic-emmanuel.picca@synchrotron-soleil.fr>
writes:

> I am packaging the next version of spyder which is a python IDE.

Thanks for working to package useful software for Debian.

> The next version will support python3
> so I need to add a spyder3 binary package which will contain
> /usr/bin/spyder3

This implies (because you're naming the binary differently) that the new
version will have features *incompatible* with previous versions. How
so?

Note that it doesn't matter what the program is implemented with; the
binary should be named for what it *does* from an end-user perspective,
not what it's built with.

> the upstream script only create /usr/bin/spyder during the build

Is that a problem? What would an end user care?

Note that I'm not assuming an answer — perhaps there really is some
important difference between the way the new version behaves that means
a user will notice incompatibilities. But this isn't necessarily so just
because of “support for Python 3”.

> It is quite usuall to add a 3 at the end of the scripts for python3
> version.

Maybe so, but often that is simply because of cargo-cult programming. If
the programs implement effectively the same features, the programs can
be named the same (and ‘update-alternatives’ would be a good choice for
managing the different versions).

If they do not – if the different versions implement different
functionality such that the user will need to care about which one they
invoke – then the programs should have different names (and
‘update-alternatives’ is *not* a good option, because this is contrary
to its purpose).

-- 
 \         “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the |
  `\                  occurrence of the improbable.” —Henry L. Mencken |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney