Re: GNOME goal for 3.8: Python 3 -- impact for pygobject itself

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Mon, 2012-11-05 at 17:33 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:

> So for the fake pygobject-py2 jhbuild project we'd specify
> "--with-python=python2".
> 
> Does that sound acceptable?

Makes sense, yeah.  So you're suggesting this gets propagated into the
shebang lines too?  If so...that does allow us to kind of punt the
whole problem to distributors.

Except in the case of jhbuild, we're using "the system python".  But we
could probably just not pass the argument for most modules, and rely
on autodetection.

The jhbuild case is actually the most horrible, because we try to
support jhbuild on top of any distribution, and that means that for
jhbuild on Arch Linux, the pygobject moduleset entry needs to say
--with-python=python, and the pygobject-py2 entry needs
--with-python=python2, but on Debian, it's exactly the opposite...

Probably the least bad thing to do is for jhbuild, just pass
--with-python=python3 for pygobject, and --with-python=python2 for
pygobject-py2.  Then we test in jhbuild if /usr/bin/python is Python 2,
*and* there's no /usr/bin/python2 symbolic link, we just insert one in
the jhbuild root.

The whole thing is just so horrible...Python upstream should have just
accepted they made a different (but closely related) programming
language and said "python" is always python2, and "python3" is 3, or
they should have made a python2 symlink upstream for the old branch, so
python2 users knew where to find it reliably.