On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 07:34:03PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > However, my understanding from what Cyril and Brandon said is that users > may prefer to have it called ‘python3’ by default, so they can install > both Python 2 and Python 3 in parallel. Furthermore, they can choose to > have (say) an alias python=python3 if that’s what they want. > > Based on that, I thought the wrapper would be mostly for internal > consumption. > > Did I get it right? > > My understanding was that users (really: Python developers) would expect > to get a ‘python3’ binary when they install the latest, and a ‘python’ > binary otherwise.
My impression was that most people would like to install the latest and greatest (python 3), but with the binary still called "python". These people could install python-default (the wrapper, which I would then expect to be the package that the average user would install). Developers who want both versions can install python-2 and python-3. The Debian python policy stipulates the following: "Python scripts depending on the default Python version (...) or not depending on a specific Python version should use python (without a version) as the interpreter name. Python scripts that only work with a specific Python version must explicitly use the versioned interpreter name (pythonX.Y)." Following this policy (which we may or may not do), if we declare Python 3 to be the default python version, then our python-3 package should contain a binary named "python", and we would have to delete the "python" binary from the version 2 package and keep only those named "python2" and "python2.7". And we should, for internal use, create a wrapper package python-default-2... But indeed, it would be nice to get our python specialists' opinion. Andreas