[bartkmq]

He defines 'vanilla' to mean 'build from upstream with little distro-specific changes'. So what does this have to do with making Python 3 the default python interpreter? I bet this symlink is not even part of the python source code; it's always a choice made by the distro maintainers.

Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.

[jwilk]

Removing an API that vast majority of Python programs were using (at that time), and replacing it with something incompatible is not a "little distro-specific change".