Re: still fixing stuff the upgrade broke...
On Thu 06 Jan 2022 at 07:24:47 (-0500), Dan Ritter wrote:
> Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:
> > So in my Xfce applications menu I have a top-level entry "Ham radio", and there was exactly _one_ program to invoke under that, called "chirp". (I use this to program radios.) I don't run this too often, but having recently acquired a new radio I went to fire it up, and got a "file not found" error. WTF? I've no idea where this menu stores its data, but there was no entry there when I went into the menu option to edit thing. It just showed *no* entry in there at all. Why an upgrade would screw with this I have no idea...
> >
> > So I downloaded the current version of the program. This gets incremental upgrades all the time, and the latest one is chirp20220103, which I downloaded. When I went to invoke it directly, there was an error about some missing python bit. Going into synaptic, I didn't see chirp listed at all, though it did show up when I did a search, and installing that package got me a version from 2018! (Why the repository can't be more up to date than that I don't know.) This also provided the missing python bit. So I edited the application menu entry to point to the new version, and it now works.
>
> The change there is that python2 and python3 are ridiculously
> incompatible with each other, so programs written in each need
> to call the appropriate interpreter. However, most python
> programs just assume that "/usr/bin/python" or `env python` will
> magically produce the right one.
>
> You can install either one of these metapackages to set the
> default:
>
> pytnon-is-python2
>
> python-is-python3
>
> Either way, something's going to break. Blame Guido Van Rossum.
That seems rather unfair. As far as the OP is concerned, their
problems seem to be as much to do with the age and mixed nature
of the system they're doing battle with.
As for Python, human nature is to ignore deadlines until they're
upon us. Unfortunately, this habit is reinforced by extending
deadlines. So seven years notice of the 2015 end for Python2
support turned into a dozen, and by now 2020-01-01 has long passed.
Throughout those years, Python3 was available, and there were
compatibility layers and cheatsheets assisting with or documenting
the production of compatible code or its conversion for deployment
when upgrading. Makes no difference to human nature.
So I think any blame should be shared around a lot more.
Cheers,
David.
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