Subject: [bug#71672] [PATCH] python: Prefer python3 over python

From: Jacob Bachmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:03:58 -0600

On 2/24/25 10:48, Karl Berry wrote:
> [...]
>
> To be clear, the above suggested factoring-out won't (intentionally)
> affect the behavior of AM_PATH_PYTHON, right? It will still look for
> "python" first, and still do all the stuff it does. I want Automake to
> stay as backward-compatible as possible.

The problem is that Python did *not* stay backward-compatible and in the 
worst way:  running a program written for Python2 on a Python3 
interpreter can silently corrupt data if I understand correctly.

At minimum, a request for an unversioned python should raise a warning 
(if not an error:  "specify Python2 or Python3") and AM_PATH_PYTHON 
should probably be deprecated in favor of separate AM_PATH_PYTHON2 and 
AM_PATH_PYTHON3.

I am insufficiently familiar with Python to say if we should have finer 
granularity than "Python3" and I am uncertain how compatible the 
different releases of Python3 actually are.

-- Jacob