[petsc-dev] python2 vs python3 wrt configure

[Satish Balay]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2013, Jed Brown wrote:

> Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:
> >> So configure using '#!/usr/bin/env python' should be fine for a while
> >> - and at some point it can be switched to '#!/usr/bin/env python2' if
> >> needed.
> >
> >
> > Will anything break if we change it now?
> 
> Default installations of Python through python-2.6 do not contain
> "python2", so those users will have to type:
> 
>   $ python configure --args
> 
> On Arch Linux, I always end up needing:
> 
>   $ python2 configure --args

Do you know if archlinux will switch over to using the guideline from python.org?

> Note that PYTHONPATH is used by both versions, despite containing
> version-specific files.  This means that you cannot use
> PYTHONPATH (reliably) when using multiple versions of Python.
> 
> 
> If we can drop support for Python prior to 2.6, we could upgrade
> BuildSystem to work with any of python 2.6, 2.7, or 3.1+.  We have to do
> this eventually anyway.

We are currently using python version from RHEL as a guideline. RHEL5
has python 2.4 with eol in march-2017.

And I see RHEL6 has python-2.6

Satish