diff --git a/doc/todo/consider_using_python3_for_rst_plugin.mdwn b/doc/todo/consider_using_python3_for_rst_plugin.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5135d153a --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/todo/consider_using_python3_for_rst_plugin.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Python 2 is officially unsupported after 2020, which is before the expected end-of-life +date of the next round of long-term-stable distributions like Debian 10 and Ubuntu 18.04, +so those distributions are encouraging all software that can migrate to Python 3 to do so. + +The down side of this is that it would make it harder to use the `rst` plugin on +very old OS releases, or on OSs where Python 3 is available but doesn't have a `python3` +symbolic link (if such OSs exist - [PEP 394](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/) +says they shouldn't), or in shared hosting environments where Python 2 is installed but +Python 3 isn't. (Mitigation: switching it to `python` or `python2` is a 1-line change.) + +For today's upload to Debian, I switched the `#!` line in the [[plugins/rst]] plugin +to `#!/usr/bin/python3`. In upstream ikiwiki it would probably be more appropriate +to use `#!/usr/bin/env python3`, and it would certainly be more appropriate to do it +by changing the source rather than by using `sed` after installation. I didn't apply that +change upstream immediately to give other maintainers a chance to comment. Thoughts? + +--[[smcv]]