On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 10:41 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Wow. The Python2 -> Python3 transition is still claiming victims!
You bet! I think it will continue for some time. I *think* that systems are only supposed to provide an executable called "python3" now, but de facto, the executable "python" seems to be a free-for-all. I only found one current system of mine where /usr/bin/python was Python 2.7: somehow I'd got python-is-python2 installed there.
Contrast this with the C -> C++ transition. They can coexist.
C++ never said it was going to replace C entirely, though. And the commands to invoke the compilers have always been different.
I get almost all my software from my distro (Fedora Linux). But there are reasons to get things through Python's "pip". Surely these two sources clash.
Yes: you can leave things in a mess doing that. So far I've never broken things entirely. So far. I occasionally have to check that my system Python hasn't been hijacked by a large package install. Anaconda did that to me once, putting its own path ahead of my one without telling me. Conversely, many of the embedded build systems I use hide their own Python3 distributions deep in their own path so they can guarantee that it'll work. Some of these are so huge (Espressif ESP IDF 4.4 comes in at around 20 GB with all dependencies to build on Tensilica and RISC-V cores) that an entire Python distro is a tiny part of the whole. The size of TeX Live makes me sad, because I remember it being "unimaginably complete" when my late and vastly effusive friend Sebastian Rahtz announced the project as filling a whole CD-ROM in the late 1990s. It's now many times that size, and will automatically be installed on your system if you go near any Gnu documentation. Stewart