Python 3.6 to become the default target

[bghoons]

I was reading the recent eselect news item about the Python 3.6 upgrade on or about June 22 --

In order to prevent dependency conflicts, please clean stray packages and rebuild/upgrade all packages with USE flag changes

It will be interesting to see how this will impact my system, especially if a new kernel comes out right about the same time.

Gentoo ~ The future is just a compile away

[ShanaXXII]

I've been on python3_6 for a while now.

Theres only a few packages that is preventing 3.5 from being depcleaned. (terminal-colors, fontforge and a few more)

[figueroa]

What does it mean? Good question. I rather mis-posted the following on a related topic here:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=8222674
but this question seems to be similar to mine.

Regarding the 5/22 news item "Python 3.6 to become the default target"

I found that to be a sufficiently cryptic news item. I have no python targets set, preferring to let portage sort it out. At one time that was a recommendation somewhere and my systems are stable, up-to-date, and everything seems to work just fine.

When I enter "eselect python list" I get:

[asturm]

What is cryptic to you? You haven't set a python target, so you use whatever is the default. The default will change, Portage will take care of it.
Your system could use some cleanup if you still have 3.4 on there.

[figueroa]

What is cryptic to me? Thank you for asking.

1. The news item doesn't say anything about how to set the default version of python. I made some good guesses. It would be helpful if developers didn't assume such a high degree of knowledge and experience.
2. emerge --depclean does not offer to remove any version of python.

I love Gentoo as much as one can love a distribution and I've used it for a very long time. I keep my systems up-to-date, I read the portage elog entris and news articles, try to stay well informed, and try to help others as much as I can, but in the end, I'm just an ordinary user.

We ordinary users could sometimes use a little more direction when it comes to important changes. So, I posted what I did in response to the news item and asked in closing if i was on a sane path, because I do know that if I don't get python right, bad things are likely to happen.

Thanks again for asking for clarification about why I found the news item to be cryptic.
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Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[NeddySeagoon]

figueroa,

You may have some world pollution that is preventing old versions of things being removed.

Pastebin /var/lib/portage/world please.

That file should only contain things you have explicitly installed.
Python, gcc, glibc and others are part of the @system set and should not be listed.
Its easy to forget --oneshot when you are fixing things and so odds and ends creep into world.

Don't use ${EDITOR} on your world file until you have a backup.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[asturm]

[figueroa]

This is a follow up. I found the following in my /var/log/portage/world file:

[NeddySeagoon]

figueroa,

dev-lang/python should not be in world either but its probably harmless.

What versions of Python you have installed is controlled by PYTHON_TARGETS, which is set in your profile.
You can override it in make.conf but you probably shouldn't.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[figueroa]

BTW, thank you asturm and NeddySeagoon for replying on this post.

As an experiment I removed dev-lang/python from /var/lib/portage/world and then depclean would have removed python-3.6.5. That didn't seem like a good thing so I restored dev/lang/python to world and then depclean is happy to do nothing.

My world file can be found at: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/A5R1HRXFi2cw5FXqFOvH/
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[NeddySeagoon]

figueroa,

Ahh ... libraries like

[figueroa]

Thank you so much, NeddySeagoon, for your commentary on my world file. That world file has been developing since about 2004, and apparently long overdue a good scrub. I'll let you know how it goes as soon as I can sanely prune it later this weekend.

The reason for the old kernel sys-kernel/gentoo-sources:4.4.111-r1 is a backup to my running kernel 4.4.128, the latest stable 4.4 version. Everything else is just cruft, apparently, except for vim. I've been a vi user for 33 years and I'm pretty stuck on it.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[Goverp]

A somewhat off-topic commentary on cryptic info:

I spent several years as a programmer before moving into customer technical support. The new job consisted largely of finding which bit of the documentation the customer had ignored and explaining it to them. When I could take no more, I went back into software development (sounds sexier, and pays better, than programming). And realised it wasn't all the customer's fault.

Programmers, developers and other IT experts tend to have a mathematical/logical mind, and any decent developer soon learns the best program is the most succinct program. I.e the code say exactly what it does, nothing more, nothing less, and in the shortest most direct way. So they produce documentation in the same style. Not a word is wasted; it tells you everything you need to know, no more, no less

But the people reading it are not the people writing it. They need a bit of redundancy. IBM used to produce a standard set of manuals for each bit of software - General Information, explaining why you bought it, Concepts and Facilities, User's Guide (a load of use cases explained), Administrator's Guide (ditto), and Reference. Now you could derive everything you needed to know from the Reference; the other manuals were redundant repetition. But they made it much easier to get your head around why you had to do something. and provided examples to work from.

In Linux-land, we're lucky to get even the reference ...

On this particular news item, I too have used Gentoo for donkey's years, yet was not clear what I needed to do. I suspected the answer was nothing, as I always do:

[depontius]

I just saw this thread this morning, and it seemed odd to me, especially considering my post of a few weeks ago.

"Standard updates" have uninstalled python-3.6 from my system. This morning seeing this post, I tried a few things...

[fedeliallalinea]

The default python target is not yet set to python 3.6 in stable system

[Naib]

I have had py36 set as the default for quite some time now partially because I am a heavy python user at work for analytical purposes and thus keeping my desktop in sync with my work machine is useful.

That said... there are still a number of packages that do not have py36 in their ebuild resulting in py34 still lingering on my system:


media-libs/gexiv2 # can be built upto py35 ONLY but my system only needs py27 support due to gimp

The tedious part is unpicking and rebuilding (botan was being held at a lower py because boost only supported a lower py)


I am more familiar with python so the unpicking and error messages are more familiar. Ruby however is a mess from my perspective.
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#define Int main()
#define Return printf
#define Print return
#include <stdio>
HelloWorld Int {
Return("Hello, world!\n");
Print 0;

[Anon-E-moose]

From the news article

On 2018-06-22, Python 3.6 will replace Python 3.5 in the default Python
targets for Gentoo systems.

So I would imagine that the "default" won't change until near that time.
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UM780, 6.1 zen kernel, gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland

[Hu]

[Jaglover]

I just finished migrating my last box. No breakages whatsoever. Disappointed. Gentoo is supposed to be fun, no?
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My Gentoo installation notes.
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[asturm]

[figueroa]

[depontius]

[asturm]

But that's a different bug entirely.

[figueroa]

NeddySeagoon, your reply of Sat May 26, 2018 3:48 pm that commented on my bloated world file was greatly helpful. I removed files from world in groups, i.e. dev-libs, media-libs, sys-libs, x11-libs etc, alternating with emerge --depclean -p where 4 + 8 + 1 + 1 + 4 (total eighteen) packages were ultimately removed including many that I'm glad to be rid of.

I feel clean and have just learned so much that I'm truly thankful. That you for not assuming that experienced users just know things.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[figueroa]