Diane Trout <di...@ghic.org> writes: > Personally, I'm ready for python to point to python3 now.
I appreciate that. In many of my hours I even concur. Both of us can have that, for our own personal environment. That doesn't answer the question of changing the behaviour of the *default* ‘python’ command installed by Debian packages, for people who have not asked for this breaking change. Those people, not party ot this conversation, have reasonable expectation that such breakage will not happen without very good reason. Good reason would entail, as an example, that there is no better alternative. The use cases provided in favour of “make an incompatible change in what the ‘python’ command does, by default” so far do not meet that standard. People who *actively want* ‘python’ to mean Python 3 can set up their environment that way today, without affecting others who have not asked for anything to change. So the desires of those people – and I can even count myself one of them! – should weigh less than those who expect the stability promised by Debian. > Python has been remarkably good at avoiding breakage, but I've seen > other scripting languages have serious incompatibilities with far less > warning. That is not an argument for changes that break default behaviour. > It might be useful to add an option to the interpreter where if a > python script is launched without a usr/bin/python2 or usr/bin/python3 > header it reports a deprecation warning (either to console or syslog) > so it's easier to find programs that still need updating. That sounds good to me. -- \ “I was stopped by the police for speeding; they said ‘Don't you | `\ know the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?’ I said ‘Yeah I know, | _o__) but I wasn't going to be out that long.’” —Steven Wright | Ben Finney
