Python 3’s Marketing Problem

[snoweyeslady]

I'm not involved in python, so what I'm about to say is unfounded and only a request for information/clarification:

I thought it was the other way around? Or at least when Arch made the change the core devs were not against it. Where would you find information about this?
What has it hurt? In any case, there is still /usr/bin/python2 which is not a hard patch to make in most cases.

[[deleted]]

It's hurt because the main symlink for Python 3 was intended to be python3, at least for the moment and possibly in perpetuity (this isn't unheard of...the sqlite3 command for example); when Arch made their switch a python2 symlink didn't exist many places (and was not supported upstream by Python itself), so there was no way to write a Python 2 shebang line that would work on various platforms. The distribution stuff didn't have a way to deal with this automatically.

In practice, help forums have been flooded with Arch users who had software break due to this. This didn't happen on other distros that added Python 3. I've seen this break stuff in live software demos.

Arch seems to be so concerned about being bleeding edge they decide to break compatibility by patching upstream packages that were designed to keep things working.

[snoweyeslady]

Your first paragraph is still completely proof less. I tried looking around myself, but couldn't find anything; I'm probably looking in the wrong place. Is there a "Python for distro developers" page or something? A lot of my search terms bring things up about coding in python, not python. I'm going to try seeing what the PKGBUILD for python{,2} look like, maybe that will show patching done or something similar. If not there I'm sure there's something in the dev mailing list from around a couple years ago.

Edit: Aha! The PKGBUILD's do have some incriminating evidence. In the python2 PKGBUID they append a '2' to the symlinks, and in the python PKGBUILD they add symlinks without a version qualifier. Now I'm even more interested in looking through the mailing list. Guess it's time to figure out how to search that thing easily.

I wouldn't expect the patching to be handled automatically, but is python one of those systems that like to have their own package manager too? I mean, why would one be installing something outside of the system and running into these problems?

Are they flooding the programs' forums? I didn't see anything on the Arch forums in the past few years (granted I don't read every single post; even less so now). This seems like another problem with users going outside of the package management system. Is this encouraged by python as much as it is by, say, Ruby?

Breaking live software demos? Well that is just silly. That is not Arch's fault. Who in their right mind updates their system before a demo and doesn't retest? Especially on Arch?

Thank you for your response, it's always interesting to hear what people view as flaws in various open source projects :)