It is the bane of backwards compatibility breakage in language semantics. I sometimes think maybe Python3 should have been another language, but it is understandable when there is so little syntactic breakage between the two you want to try to tie them together than diverge on the unicode issue.
> Arch Linux targets and accommodates competent GNU/Linux users by giving them complete control and responsibility over the system.
I started to specify my python preference in my #! (ie #!/usr/bin/python3) in my own programs. If everyone did this the move would be much easier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_%28Unix%29#Portability
I still specify it every time anyway, but thought it'd be worth mentioning. :)
The --python switch is really great, though, particularly now that 3 is getting distro traction and most of us who work in Python are likely maintaining a lot of 2.x projects. Thanks!
The PEP itself should maybe point that out and not say that `python`SHOULD refer to python2 and at the same time MAY refer to python3. It only helps to the confussion.