Todays pacman -Syu had a neat surprise. Decent list of python
packages were requiring an update.
“The default “python” package is now for the 3.x series while the 2.x series has been moved to a “python2” package, with python-2.7 having been scheduled to be the last major release in the python-2.x series.” Allan McRae writes in the news.
For anyone familiar with how python is used on the unix platform, alarm bells should ring, loud. “dependency hell” on the unix platform is real, very real. My package manager just overwrote the “python” shortcut in /usr/bin and every external package depending on this reference will now stop working — if it doesn’t support python 3.1. Now one should say that people ought to have python 3.1 support by now, but things are rarly that simple. I guess this will at least cause some patches to be pushed from arch linux developers in the near future.