Apple deprecated direct access to system-provided interpreter installations, which is a good thing. Interpreter support was not and will not be a problem, the implication of the deprecation is you should install your own copy of those interpreters instead.
Yes, I understand that we can and should always install our own, and I have for years either with Homebrew or Conda. (Actually most of my development is python on Linux via Vagrant).
But on the M1 Mini, out of the box, you can open Terminal, and python3 launches the Python 3.8 REPL. Python 2.7 also launches out of the box. So, can you explain what you mean by "direct access" not being allowed? I'm not following your distinction.
It's damn convenient having python always available when managing a fleet of Macs with JAMF.
I can imagine many existing tools still rely on the commands being directly accessible on PATH, and Apple may be reluctant to break them outright even that’s the goal. They are declared deprecated so people would refrain from using them for new things, and move old things away from them. That’s basically what deprecation means in software, as I understand it. Those commands wouldn’t be called deprecated if Apple breaks them outright.
Ok. Well, I don't have the Xcode command line tools installed. This is what I see:
% ls -l /usr/bin/python*
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 75 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/python -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python2.7
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 82 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/python-config -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python2.7-config
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 75 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/python2 -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python2.7
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 75 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/python2.7 -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python2.7
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 82 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/python2.7-config -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python2.7-config
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 137536 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/python3
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 76 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/pythonw -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/pythonw2.7
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 76 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/pythonw2.7 -> ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/pythonw2.7
% ls -l /usr/bin/pip*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 137536 Jan 1 2020 /usr/bin/pip3
I had assumed that /usr/bin/python3 was part of the system, since it is not a symlink. But then when I do this, I see it is indeed hitting Xcode:
% /usr/bin/python3
objc[12852]: Class AMSupportURLConnectionDelegate is implemented in both ?? (0x20ab7e7a0) and ?? (0x1143782b8). One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.
objc[12852]: Class AMSupportURLSession is implemented in both ?? (0x20ab7e7f0) and ?? (0x114378308). One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.
Python 3.8.2 (default, Oct 2 2020, 10:45:41)
[Clang 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.27)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> print(os.environ['PYTHONPATH'])
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/os.py", line 675, in __getitem__
raise KeyError(key) from None
KeyError: 'PYTHONPATH'
So Xcode is definitely involved.
EDIT: So I uninstalled Xcode. /usr/bin/python3 is there, but it is clearly a stub file of some sort. If you run it without Xcode or Xcode command line tools installed, you get a popup to install the command line tools. So python3 is not part of the system, but the stubs for it are. Thanks for the patience.
Even more interesting, if you have Xcode, but not the command line tools, the stub launches Python3.8 from the Xcode installation. Once you install the command line tools, it then switches to launching that version. Presumably this is all because of the read-only system volume.