Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

> Yeah, this is good reasoning.  And yes, I'm on Arch: python points to
> python3, and python2 points to python2.  

I'm also on Arch and it has been this way since October 2010 [1].
Ubuntu plans to remove python2 from the desktop CD images in 14.04 [2],
so having code that does not work with python3 will become more painful
pretty soon.

Note that RHEL5 has only python2.4 and will be supported through March,
2017.  Since it is not feasible to have code that works in both python3
and any versions prior to python2.6, any chosen dialect will be broken
by default on some major distributions that still have full vendor
support.

> A couple of thoughts while we're on the subject:
>
> 1. We should probably convert git-remote-{hg,bzr} to use this style
> too: 

Python-2.6.8 from python.org installs only python2.6 and python, but not
python2, so this will break on a lot of older systems.  Some
distributions have been nice enough to provide python2 symlinks anyway.

Michael's rationale that at least the error message is obvious still
stands.

> Debian uses an alternatives mechanism to have multiple versions of the
> same package

Alternatives is global configuration that doesn't really solve this
problem anyway.


[1] https://www.archlinux.org/news/python-is-now-python-3/
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python/3