On 2016-08-29 23:56, Chris Angelico wrote: > Up until very recently, the system Python has only been the Python 2. > (For a while, it wasn't even 2.7, but I could easily use altinstall > for that.) I have deliberately wanted to use 3.6 for ALL testing, not > just by messing with venvs or shell aliases, in order to enforce > dogfooding on everything (and for consistency); older Pythons are > available as python3.4 and python3.5, but the live python3 has always > been the one built from tip. And even as Debian starts to embrace Py3 > internally, this hasn't been a problem. > > If your goal is stability, sure. Don't mess with what 'env python3' > runs. But if you want to thoroughly test stuff? That's different. > > ChrisA
This seems like a reasonably large problem on Debian's part. I was under the impression that system-critical Python scripts used absolute paths in their hashbang lines, to avoid exactly this situation. If something really depends on the system Python version (whichever 2.x or 3.x that might be), it should explicitly use that Python installation. User scripts, of course, should use "/usr/bin/env python3" to be usable in a virtualenv or under whatever Python installation the user chooses. I believe the Gentoo package manager has logic to adjust the hashbang lines of Python scripts if a package requests it, and I'm not as familiar with Debian packaging but I'd be surprised if the Debian tools were missing this functionality. MMR... -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
