The serious need is that we need to patch all the scripts that ask for python to add a 3 to it. And there will be more of these going forward, not less. I’d rather just always have python available. Not a problem worth deliberating over to be honest.
Alex
On 22 Nov 2022, at 04:42, Markus Volk via lists.openembedded.org <f_l_k=t-online.de@lists.openembedded.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21 2022 at 06:48:07 PM +0100, Alexander Kanavin <alex.kanavin@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On my Debian systems, indeed, /usr/bin/python is absent.
>
> Debian has a package for this
> https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/python-is-python3
And that’s a perfectly good solution that I like.
Personally, I think people should forget that /usr/bin/python exists: the recommendation from Python is to call python2 or python3. I can quote from PEP-0394:
“””
Depending on a distribution or system configuration, python may or may not be installed. If python is installed its target interpreter may refer to python2 or python3.”
…
• Distributors may choose to set the behavior of the python command as follows:
• python2,
• python3,
• not provide python command,
• allow python to be configurable by an end user or a system administrator.
“””
We’ve picked option 3. As per Python upstream, that’s absolutely fine.
If you have a serious need that /usr/bin/python exists, and is a symlink to python3, then could you not make a simple recipe that RDEPENDS on python3 and ships just a /usr/bin/python -> python3 symlink? You can even put this in your layer to avoid having to debate it with the oe-core maintainers.
Ross