[Python-Dev] [PEPs] Rebooting PEP 394 (aka Support the /usr/bin/python2 symlink upstream)

Tue Jul 26 20:50:47 CEST 2011

In article <4E2EE813.1080407 at netwok.org>,
 Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> wrote:
> Le 26/07/2011 18:05, Antoine Pitrou a écrit :
> > Le mardi 26 juillet 2011 à 10:56 -0500, Kerrick Staley a écrit :
> >> I'm indifferent either way. python3 is a hard link to python3.2, so I
> >> thought we'd make everything that way for consistency.
> > Is it? Yikes, I didn't know about that. 
> Yikes for me too. I’ve had a quick look at the Makefile (look for
> $(LN)) and found that all scripts use symbolic links, but the python3 to
> python3.y link is hard. I wonder why this is.

I pointed that out earlier in the thread:
"But if you look at the Python 3 "bininstall" target (Makefile.pre.in 
starting around line 870 or so), you'll see that, for Python 3, symlinks 
are made for all the versioned files except "python3". I'm not sure 
that there is a particular reason why a distinction was made; IIRC, the 
other versioned links were added later in the cycle. The other Python 3 
versioned links could probably be changed to hard links as well. In the 
end, I don't think it makes a lot of difference. But it would be better 
if Python 2 and Python 3 were consistent here."
I don't think it makes all that much difference one way or the other. 
But it would be better for them all to be one kind or the other.
-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org