1628650 - Prefer Python 3 on MozillaBuild

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1697833

(Firefox Build System :: MozillaBuild, task)

Description

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

Now that mach supports Python 3, it's probably worth to prefer Python 3 on $PATH.

Comment 1

[(Away)]

Ricky, can you foresee any problems from doing this?

Comment 2

[Ricky Stewart]

By "prefer Python 3 on $PATH", I assume you mean that when you type python at the shell, you'll get a python3 shell rather than a python2.7 one.

There will almost definitely be people whose workflows are broken by this, whether those workflows are based on code in-tree or not. This is not that concerning to me, although that is a factor.

Are there other OS distributions today where the python binary at the head of the $PATH is a python3 (where python2.7 is also an option)? I'm used to having to type python3 to run Python 3. If nothing else, staying consistent with other Unixy shells across the universe is something I'd like to do, if only because MozillaBuild is already so inconsistent with other Unixy shells.

Comment 3

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

Ubuntu 20.04 has only Python 3 by default while there is no python alias, unless the user installs python-is-python3.

Comment 4

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

Fedora 32's python is Python 3 by default. (I do not know if this can be overridden.)

Comment 5

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

This is being done as part of fixing some other Python-related issues in MozillaBuild.