Re: PyCon BoF: Stretch goals for cPython, PyPy & CFFI
On Tuesday, April 14, 2015 08:24:01 AM Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> On 14 April 2015 at 08:10, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
> > But it fails unhelpfully when you use it in a shebang.
> >
> > $ /tmp/foo.py
> > bash: /tmp/foo.py: /usr/bin/python: bad interpreter: No such file or
> > directory
> >
> > Let's make the latter more helpful.
> >
> From a script authors point of view, it's currently safe to assume that a
> shebang like '#!/usr/bin/env python' will work on any Linux machine. In
> some cases (Arch) it may already refer to Python 3, but with some care it's
> entirely possible to write a script that can do the right thing on Python 2
> or 3. If distros start to remove 'python', there's an interim period before
> it's safe to assume that 'python3' is available everywhere, and script
> authors currently don't have any good options to bridge that.
>
> I know Debian is all in on treating Python 2 and 3 as two entirely separate
> worlds, but that's not how everyone sees them. It would be nice to make
> some kind of affordance to people for whom they are two versions of the
> same language.
My concern regarding the future of /usr/bin/python isn't for things that are
being updated, but for things that aren't. Anything written for python3
already uses /usr/bin/python3, so there's no forward compatibility issue.
I have scripts I use locally that are untouched in almost a decade that use
/usr/bin/python. They work and require no maintenance. I've not ported them
to python3, because there's no need. It would seriously break my expectations
as an admin if at some point I upgraded to a new version of Debian and
/usr/bin/python magically switched to python3 and all my stuff broke.
It's at least half a decade too soon to even think about this (I know Arch
went insane, but that's their problem IMO).
Scott K
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