On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > In article <XT7vu.64127$qi4.25...@fx11.iad>, > Travis McGee <nob...@nowhere.com> wrote: > >> The Python.org site says that the future is Python 3, yet whenever I try >> something new in Python, such as Tkinter which I am learning now, >> everything seems to default to Python 2. By this I mean that, whenever I >> find that I need to install another package, it shows up as Python 2 >> unless I explicitly specify Python 3. >> >> What's the deal? If I want to make a distributable software package, >> should it be 2 or 3? Enquiring minds want to know. > > The future is indeed Python 3. The problem with the future is that it's > not here yet.
Or to be more precise, is not exclusively here yet. The past is Python 2; the future is Python 3. The present is both Pythons, running in parallel; if you're lucky, that's 2.7 and the latest 3.x, though not everyone has that luxury. For new code, aim for Python 3 unless you have a good reason to go for Python 2. Most Linux distributions come with Python 2 under the name "python", and Python 3 under the name "python3"; stick with that and you'll be fairly safe. Or, if you can depend on your users having a recent Py3 installed, you can use the launcher packaged with 3.3 and later, which can intelligently figure out versioning. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
