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Comment by Kadin | Hacker News Reader

Not a good move. Considering the large base of programs that expect Python 2.x, the safe thing to do would be to keep /usr/bin/python pointing at the 2.x binaries while using /usr/bin/python3 for the 3.x ones. At some point in the future if Python 2.x really is dead, you can just point both python and python3 at the same thing.

This seems more like somebody trying to evangelize for Python 3 and against Python 2, by purposely breaking a lot of old software, and quite antithetical to the Robustness Principle that I would expect most good software to at least attempt to shoot for.

Hopefully other distros will take a more conservative path. Python 2.x is going to be around for a long, long time.

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The platforms making bold enough breaking changes to progress are usually better for it. One case Apple on intel/OSX. Granted this is painful for legacy stuff but that only helps keep things up to date. If people don't start doing this Python 3 will never progress.

However, there should be no 'default' python. People should go get 2 or 3 as needed. If there is a default it should be the latest version.

Did Apple really make a 'breaking change' with the switch to Intel? PPC apps ran with a PPC emulator. As far as I know they didn't break, they were just deprecated.

There's a big difference between breaking and deprecation.

Python2 is also still around, if you need it.

It's not around as `python2` on other distros though, which is the problem. Either all other distros have to change to conform to arch, or arch has to change it back to how it was.

My Ubuntu has python2.

I agree with that generally, but in the case of Python 3, there are real roadblocks at this point, not just intertia. Central pieces are missing. There is not a single postgres adapter that works reliably with Python 2 and 3. It's impossible to write robust web apps using Python 3 because of the WSGI conundrum.

Actually, the situation is very damaging for Python, because Python has momentum _now_ and many new users are confused and put off by the fact that they cannot use the latest Python version for their projects.

Granted, these issues affect mainly web development, which may not be the main concern of a Linux distribution.

Chances are exceedingly good that Arch package maintainers will be checking their Python applications and updating them to use /usr/bin/python2 if they don't run under Python 3. Actually, this should have already happened since the change has apparently been in testing for awhile.

I'm not really familiar with what Arch package maintainers do but aren't package maintainer mainly packager and not coders ?

I imagine that someone could easily be packaging 10 Python apps or libraries. He can't be upgrading all that code to Python 3 as it is not always a trivial task and would require a lot of work and constant patching if the developing team keeps working with Python 2.X

But overall, I think this is a good way to push developers to upgrade or at least prepare more to move to Python 3.

You're misunderstanding. Arch is still shipping Python 2.7 with the python2 package.

So package maintainers don't need to rewrite upstream code if it's not compatible with Python 3; they just need to update dependencies and set paths to point to the /usr/bin/python2 binary.

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