On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:13:22 -0400
Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org> wrote:

> This past weekend, the topic of the current state of Python 3 in
> Gentoo was raised once again in the #gentoo-dev IRC channel. Here's
> where we currently stand:
> 
> 1. Python 3.2 is installed by default on major arches due to its
> presence in the stage3 tarball.
> 
> 2. Python 2 is NOT installed by default as nothing in the system set
> actually depends on it.
> 
> 3. In most cases, users end up building and installing Python 2.7 as a
> dependency of some other package once they have their system set up.
> Users end up having two versions of Python installed.
> 
> This third point is the cause of some annoyance for several (many?)
> developers and users. In most cases, there really is no reason for a
> user to have two versions of Python installed; it is simply a
> redundant set of code. However, if you attempt to remove Python 3,
> portage will just pull it back on the next world upgrade unless you
> mask it.
> 
> I don't think this makes for a very good user experience. So, how can
> we change that?
> 
> As I see it, we need a way to avoid portage's overly optimistic
> upgrade mechanic. One way to do that is to drop the stable keywords
> on Python 3, but I feel that is dishonest; Python 3 itself is
> perfectly stable, so we should not force users to unmask it.

Portage is doing something like that? Paludis, yes, but portage - I
doubt it. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't pull anything in unless
something (*anything*) depends on python:3, or python without SLOT.

Well, unless you're saying that very, very smart python.eclass have
just built a lot of apps with semi-automagic dependency on python:3.*
and you didn't rebuild them all without 3.* in USE_PYTHON.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny