[Nix-dev] Python 3 as default

[Richard Ipsum]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 11:29:32AM +0100, Freddy Rietdijk wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> Thanks for sharing the PEP.
> 
> Actually, we, or at least I, chose to ignore that PEP, and so we do
> symlink.
> 

Out of interest can I ask what the rationale for that decision is?

I'd like to try to persuade you not to symlink python to python3,
because doing so potentially breaks existing python2 programs.

But since I'm not an active contributor to this project it's not my place
to argue here really. :)

Thanks,
Richard

[snip]
> 
> 
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:40 AM, Richard Ipsum <richardipsum at fastmail.co.uk
> > wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 10:08:07AM +0100, Freddy Rietdijk wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > As you may be aware the plan is to change to Python 3.5 as default for
> > > 17.03. There were a couple of things that had to be done, and I think
> > we're
> > > ready now to make the change. Packages that require Python 2 are now
> > pinned
> > > to do so.
> > >
> > > Now, obviously I haven't been able to test all packages myself, but
> > judging
> > > from what Hydra reports and from working from the `python3` branch I
> > don't
> > > expect any major issues.
> > >
> > > The Python 2.7 interpreter had quite some patches, among one to make the
> > > interpreter and Python packages more deterministic. I say more, because
> > > they're not fully deterministic yet. I have some patches lining up for
> > the
> > > 3.5 interpreter to improvement determinism there as well.
> > >
> > > In any case, I would like to merge this as soon as possible. Any
> > objections?
> > >
> > > Freddy
> >
> > Hi, I'm not really an active contributor here but I follow NixOS because
> > I think it's a really cool project.
> >
> > Am I to understand that NixOS is considering replacing the python2
> > interpreter with the python3 interpreter, as arch did?
> >
> > If that's the case it may be worth considering this pep[1] first.
> >
> > If I've misunderstood and there's no intention to symlink 'python' to
> > 'python3'
> > then please ignore this. :)
> >
> > [1]: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/#id5
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> >