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by xj9 4194 days ago
You could solve that problem by not using Ubuntu: SmartOS, Debian, and OS X all have perfectly functional Python 3 packages. (as I'm sure many distributions and operating systems do)

This has very little to do with Python 3.

5 comments

Archlinux defaults to python3 (the default python is just a symlink), and most of the things are pretty good, though there are plenty of python2 related problems, and problems because of the devs patching the upstream distro too much...

All in all it's quite okay, and definitely on the right path.

Ubuntu is one the most deployed server distributions of linux, and one of the most battle tested. While this post isn't meant to criticize python 3 (I think the language is perfectly fine as is), it's meant to criticize the ecosystem, where one of the most deployed distributions doesn't work.
Yes, but Debian is also very widely deployed and doesn't ship with a broken Python 3 package. I'm just pointing out that your issue is specifically related to Ubuntu. You'd be better off calling your article: Ubuntu is Not A Suitable Platform for Python 3 Development, or something along those lines.
Actually, this exact issue was also an issue in Debian. The bug reports can be found further down in an answer to the same stackoverflow question. It may now be fixed, I'm not sure.
The issue linked was against jessie/sid. Debian users expect broken things outside of stable.

The Ubuntu release in question was the LTS Ubuntu.

CentOS is arguably the most deployed server distribution of Linux, and it (RH) ships a perfectly fine python3 via SCL.

Ubuntu is a snapshot of Debian unstable, and it's not surprising that shipping cutting edge packages results in a few that are broken.

>This has very little to do with Python 3.

Which is the point of the article and P3's biggest problem: All the things surrounding it.

The people behind Python seems desperate to push everybody to Python 3, mostly by telling people how much better Python 3 is than Python 2. But the thing is, that doesn't matter when the environment surrounding Python 3 is considerably worse than for Python 2.

If you ask me to switch OSes in order to do something, there has to be a very strong value proposition to get me to risk the time.
Using Anaconda solved all this for me.