[CentOS-devel] RHEL 8, and potentially CentOS 8, lack "/usr/bin/python"

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 8:41 AM Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:

> A system may have 3 pythons on it , and each one will look in different places for libraries
>
> platform-python is a minimal python which is meant only for allowing system packages to run. It will probably not see much updates over the life of RHEL-8. This is based of off python-3.6
> python2.7 which is the 2.7 version of python and I expect will have a lifetime until RHEL-7 is end of lifed. At that point the module will probably be ended.
> python3.6 which is the 3.6 module and may later be end of lifed and replaced with python-<major>.<minor> of upstreams choosing.

Begging your pardon, but so what if there are many distinct pythons
available? It this one is the system default python, great. But this
is making various existing tools incompatible, with this and other
"platform" packages. don't break the existing tools, especially Fedora
and backporting work from there to RHEL and CentOS. This renaming
particularly includes the CentOS 7 "extras" packages with "python" in
the name, all 76 of them. It's creating work.

I'm also afraid I don't see where the frequency of updates affects
this. This is partly because I think it's very optimistic to say that
python 3.6 won't get any incremental updates. It's already been
updated once since the original DVD medium was published for RHEL 8.
It's fairly common to do minor updates to tools like this during point
releases.

This "rename packages as platform-package" name seems confusing and
unnecessary. If that kind of reference to "platform" versions were
needed, perhaps it should have been published as a metapackage, with
"platform-python" empty except for "Includes: python3". As it is, it
seems merely confusing and in conflict with 20 years of Red Hat
package naming convention.