Hi Nick, 2017-11-14 11:07 GMT+01:00 Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com>:
> On 14 November 2017 at 16:47, Michel Desmoulin <desmoulinmic...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Proposal A: >> ----------- >> >> Suffix Python executable on Windows like on Unix, so that people will >> type pythonX.X if they want a specify version. >> >> Pros: easy and discoverable. >> >> Cons: you need a lot of stuff in the system path. >> > > Con: we hope to have the problem resolved on the Linux distro side such > that "python" typically means "python" by the time community support for > Python 2 ends in 2020. Since Windows has gone the better part of two > decades without version Python commands, adding them because we're > impatient with the pace of change at the Linux distro level doesn't really > make sense (especially when Linux holds such a small fraction of the > non-phone client device market). > Perhaps I could sell you on the idea of a Windows "python3" executable, not as the New Official Way to do things, but rather as a pragmatic measure to make code from those Linux weirdos ;-) more likely to work on Windows. I would like to compare it with the strings/bytes-for-pathnames issue: the official recommendation is to use strings everywhere, problems with round-tripping arbitrary not-valid-UTF8 filenames on POSIX have been solved now. Still, POSIX people continued to use bytes, so a pragmatic change was to make so that bytes now also work reliably as pathnames under Windows. Similarly, even when all Linux distributions have switched to python==python3, people will probably still read and write tutorials with python3 in it, and perhaps we should accommodate that. Otherwise I am +1 on your proposal C: if anything this thread has made it clear that there is so much variety in third-party Python installers, not just Linux distributions, but also things like Anaconda, that it seems unreasonable to require that the official Python documentation covers all those situations. Stephan
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