Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Reverted python3.4 defaults

[Mike Gilbert]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 12:42 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> wrote:
> On 20 July 2015 at 00:03, Mike Gilbert <floppym@g.o> wrote:
>> If there are no objections, I would like to enable python3.4 by
>> default on Saturday, July 25. That means making the following change:
>>
>> profiles/base/make.defaults:
>> PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_4"
>
> I would like to note that we only have around 50 packages that require
> python3, while the majority requires python2, and the remainder will
> function with either. For this reason it seems to make more sense to
> me to only set PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7" as default, and leave adding
> any python3_* targets to the user. This will also debloat our stage3
> tarballs.

It looks like we have eliminated most (all?) of the unbounded
dependencies on dev-lang/python from the gentoo repository, so this
could actually work to satisfy the goal of smaller stages and only
having one version of python installed.

However, it feels like a step backward to me; I would rather treat
python3 as the primary interpreter and python2 as the one necessary
for the legacy baggage.

I don't see any strong technical reason to switch from python2 +
python3 to python2-only enabled. Some people don't like having two
versions of python installed -- that's about the gist of it.

So, I'm personally not going to make that change without some kind of
vote on it. I can arrange a vote within the python team if you like.