Re: on keep providing python 2 packages

[Barry Warsaw <barry@debian.org>]

On Aug 19, 2016, at 08:19 AM, Sandro Tosi wrote:

>I got a feeling we are somehow discouraging the introduction of
>python2 package in unstable (it was also discussed at the BoF).

Hi Sandro,

Just to clarify my own opinion, for *libraries* which upstream supports both
Python 2 and Python 3, we should provide both in Debian.  It's also easy, so
why not? :)

I think we should discourage libraries where upstream only provides Python 2
versions, by trying to find bilingual alternatives.  Sometimes this is
unavoidable though.

For *applications* which support both Python 2 and 3, we want to install them
only as Python 3 applications, unless there's some overriding reason why we
need to provide them for both.  That gets into the ugly `nose2-3` situation,
so let's really try to avoid that, and encourage `$python -m` style invocation
where possible.

Now let's talk about libraries for PyPy and Jython. :)

Cheers,
-Barry