Re: Some questions concerning GSoC 2012

[William Ting <william h ting gmail com>]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 7:25 AM, Phitherek_ <phitherek gmail com> wrote:

> 3. In your GSoC info page you say, that I should fix some minor bug before
> applying. I planned to try it, but I could not build Epiphany with JHBuild.
> The main problem is, that I use Arch Linux, where since some time ago the
> default version of Python is Python 3 (and this is "python"), and Python 2
> is executed by "python2". The buildscripts are written in Python 2, but they
> all have "python" and not "python2" in the #!. This is, however, kind of
> easy to fix. I got stuck when I tried to build glib and I had to remove more
> and more lines in the script to work - in the end that had not worked
> anyway. It was something with "parser.py". Could you help me also with that?

ArchLinux defaults to Python 3. This causes a problem with older
Python programs since they link to the Python 3 interpreter when
they're expecting a Python 2 interpreter. Newer scripts should be
using `#!/usr/bin/env python2` (or python3) instead of `#!/usr/bin/env
python`.

Since pretty much all new Python 3 programs refer to the python3
interpreter explicitly, you can safely default your system back to
Python 2. In other words:

sudo rm -v /usr/bin/python
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python2 /usr/bin/python

This is a much easier alternative than modifying all build scripts to
use the Python 2 interpreter.

- William Ting