In a life long ago, we'd have made /usr/bin/python a shell script, containing

echo "please run /usr/bin/python3"

--dave

On Wed, 11 May 2022 at 14:54, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 09:30:41AM -0400, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:

I just did the 22.04 upgrade thing, and it seems that Firefox will be held
at v 99 if you don't have snapd. So beware of old/held packages as you
update.

Another delightful thing I found is that Ubuntu took its very own special
path in the "Sensible things to do in the Python 2 / Python 3" debacle:
remove Python 2, but don't link python3 to python. Move fast and break
stuff is very tiring when you're constantly getting beaten up like this.

Upstream python says not to call python3 as python.  So Unbuntu did
it correctly.

Python 3 code calls /usr/bin/python3 (or probably better yet /usr/bin/env
python3) and legacy python 2 code calls /usr/bin/python.

That actually makes sense.  Then the next one can be 'python4' without
causing problems.  But many distros - and many system administrators
will probably just make it 'python'.  <sigh>

Yup.  Here's Fedora 35:

$ which python
/usr/bin/python
$ python --version
Python 3.10.4

Debian is guilty of the same thing - which is interesting, because
Ubuntu is based on Debian and would have had to take a detour to "do
the right thing."

Debian and Fedora both also have /usr/bin/python3.

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com |              -- Mark Twain

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