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by AsyncAwait 3421 days ago
The rest of the world explicitly doesn't ship the latest software, check the kernel version in the latest version of ubuntu vs arch, same for GNOME etc. Ubuntu did not even had python3 installed for a long time by default, you had to apt-get it

The ABI was never documented and at best a convention-enforced one.
1 comments
rlpb 3421 days ago
> Ubuntu did not even had python3 installed for a long time by default, you had to apt-get it

I call your straw man. As I've already repeatedly said, the issue is about breaking ABI, not about what software distributions shipped, nor what they had installed by default. Making /usr/bin/python point to Python 3 has nothing to do with what distributions shipped, nor what they had installed by default. The issues are completely orthogonal. Stop trying to pretend otherwise.

> The ABI was never documented and at best a convention-enforced one.

Upstream shipped build systems that put Python 2 in /usr/bin/python, and Python 3 in /usr/bin/python3. That's about as good a definition of ABI as one gets in the free software world. Arch deliberately patched the ABI. You can try to argue that their decision to do so was correct, even though I disagree. You cannot argue that they didn't know they were changing an ABI when they patched the ABI.

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AsyncAwait 3421 days ago
> call your straw man. As I've already repeatedly said, the issue is about breaking ABI, not about what software distributions shipped,

But it is very much about that. Arch ships latest software, Python 3 is the latest python, python 2 is not. Ubuntu, Debian etc. ship old, outdated software regularly, Arch doesn't.

Because the latest python was python 3, /usr/bin/python pointed there. The other distributions explicitly decided not to ship the latest python.

Prior to Arch making the switch, the 'ABI' was not /usr/bin/python points to python 2, it simply pointed to the latest python release, which on most systems happened to be python 2, because they did not even ship python 3 at all at the time.

You may not agree with the decision, but to pretend like it was "out of nowhere" is unhelpful.

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