On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Bohuslav Kabrda <bkab...@redhat.com> wrote:
> - What should user get after using "yum install python"?
> There are basically few ways of coping with this:
> 1) Just keep doing what we do, eventually far in the future drop "python" 
> package and never provide it again (= go on only with python3/python4/... 
> while having "yum install python" do nothing).
> 2) Do what is in 1), but when "python" is dropped, use virtual provide (*) 
> "python" for python3 package, so that "yum install python" installs python3.
> 3), 4) Rename python to python2 and {don't add, add} virtual provide "python" 
> in the same way that is in 1), 2)
> 5) Rename python to python2 and python3 to python at one point. This makes 
> sense to me from the traditional "one version in distro + possibly compat 
> package shipping the old" approach in Linux, but some say that Python 2 and 
> Python 3 are just different languages [3] and this should never be done.
> All of the approaches have their pros and cons, but generally it is all about 
> what user should get when he tries to install python - either nothing or 
> python2 for now and python3 in future - and how we as a distro cope with that 
> on the technical side (and when we should actually do the switch).
> Just as a sidenote, IMO the package that gets installed as "python" (if any) 
> should point to /usr/bin/python, which makes consider these two points very 
> closely coupled.

On Gentoo we get python2 and python3 executables and have user-level
tools to change what the 'python' symlink points to. I think we
default to only having Python 3 installed (and Python 3 is even made
the default Python), though it's currently always the case that Python
2 gets pulled in by some core dependencies.

Cheers,

Dirkjan
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