Catching up

[Richard Laager]

Debian has two versions of Python. Debian's Python 3.x executable name
is python3, so `/usr/bin/env python` gets me Python 2.x. I think this is
a great example of this question.

My previous rough sketch hand-waved over a complicated part, which is
how to figure out the python binary path. Even if Python provides a
trivial way to get the interpreter's path, things like symlinks can
complicate that. For example, it might return /usr/bin/python2.7 when
the user wants /usr/bin/python, or vice versa, depending on what exactly
they are trying to accomplish.

If any feature to solve this is going to exist, a non-default option is
probably the best. For example, something like this for me:
  python3 waf configure --python=/usr/bin/python3
  python3 waf build
  python3 waf install

That would avoid the big (but trivial) patch I have in the Debian
package to replace all the shebang lines. As new utilities are added, I
wouldn't have to catch them and update the patch. That'd be an
improvement, but to be honest, it's not a huge problem.

On 01/07/2018 04:59 PM, Gary E. Miller via devel wrote:
> Gentoo
> has a tool called eselect.  With it I can select what version of python
> to use as system default from the command line.

For my own curiosity, does eselect manipulate a /usr/bin/python symlink?

-- 
Richard

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