On Mon, 10 Apr 2017 10:58:10 -0700 Christopher Head wrote: > On April 9, 2017 7:04:13 PM PDT, "William L. Thomson Jr." > wrote: > >The present system is a PITA for users. Fiddling with adding/removing > >targets for Python/Ruby. > > As an ordinary user, that does sound like a real annoyance. As an > ordinary user, I also never do it. I don’t have any targets set by > hand. I probably never will. This is why it is not an issue for you. Your basically saying I do not care what version of Python is on my system. I do not care how many versions of python. I mentioned in a post, doing a wildcard on the targets being the ONLY painless option for users. > And yes, I do some Python development > myself (not much packaging but “using” Python in the sense of writing > Python code). I find the Python experience largely painless: I > currently have 2.7.12 and 3.4.5 installed. Are you running stable? There are other versions in tree. 3.4, 3.5, 3.6. If you were running unstable, you would have 4 pythons, including 2.7. That you only have 2 seems like you are running stable. If your writing new python code against say 3.4 and not 3.6. Not sure about that... Seems like it would keep things bound to older versions and never let things move forward. Usually when writing new code, you use the latest version of stuff. Not always but usually best. If anything make code support older while targeting newer. > Eventually 3.5 will get > installed and 3.4 will go away. Just like every other package. I > won’t need to do any config file editing, just a revdep-rebuild run > perhaps. So regardless of the situation for maintainers, as a user, I > don’t see this pain. Because you are not setting or dealing with the targets. You went with the mindless approach. Like doing a wildcard on USE flags. Your enabling support for all versions across the board for anything that supports it. That is quite a different experience if you go trying to use a specific one. -- William L. Thomson Jr.