I love this about Arch. It gives everything a very vanilla, organic feel and you never get caught off guard by some distro specific change.

Ditto. Arch has the right attitude. I still have a bitter taste from a 0 day hack of one of my Debian servers, due to what I believed was a Debian only patch. I wish more distros followed the Arch approach. Redhat is particularly bad I think - I have had problems with the centos frankenkernel that I could never reproduce on other systems.

So, maybe this is not quite the same thing, but wasn't it Arch (and only Arch?) that made python point to python3? And in doing so went against what the upstream Python project explicitly specified to do? I remember dealing with a few users who ran into this.

I believe they made this change before the official advice was contrary to it.

Also, if you download and compile Python from python.org, isn't it also just 'python' that you get as your executable? If so arch is just following upstream, and the Python devs should follow their own advice.

Arch doesn't seem to be patching this, though you can see in the PKGBUILD that arch explicitly creates 'python3' as a link to 'python' (with a comment lamenting that this isn't done by default) :

https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk?h...

> I believe they made this change before the official advice was contrary to it.

Arch: ~2010 PEP: ~2011-2012

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/28639

Off topic but I have to say as an occasional dabbler this is something that drives me crazy whenever I take a look. So much talk of Python 2 being obsolete and irrelevant to new devs. Yet the command 'python' points to Python 2. Seriously?

From PEP 394:

"in preparation for an eventual change in the default version of Python, Python 2 only scripts should either be updated to be source compatible with Python 3 or else to use python2 in the shebang line."

So it will change eventually. But why rush to break things?