Re: Switching PL/Python to Python 3 by default in PostgreSQL 12

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 2019-07-07 00:34, Steven Pousty wrote:
>> Why would it be a 13 or later issue?

> Because PostgreSQL 12 is feature frozen and in beta, and this issue is
> not a regression.

More to the point: it does not seem to me that we should change what
"plpythonu" means until Python 2 is effectively extinct in the wild.
Which is surely some years away yet. If we change it sooner than
that, the number of people complaining that we broke perfectly good
installations will vastly outweigh the number of people who are
happy because we saved them one keystroke per function definition.

As a possibly relevant comparison, I get the impression that most
packagers of Python are removing the versionless "python" executable
name and putting *nothing* in its place. You have to write python2
or python3 nowadays. Individuals might still be setting up symlinks
so that "python" does what they want, but it's not happening at the
packaging/distro level.

(This comparison suggests that maybe what we should be thinking
about is a way to make it easier to change what "plpythonu" means
at the local-opt-in level.)

regards, tom lane