There is a serious problem when "pretty much any system" excludes both Debian and Mac OS X, and I don't know which others. The "python2" symlink is frighteningly recent in the Python world, and some of us like to support systems other than the bleeding edge. It makes me kind of skeptical that you read my post, because this was the main point of my complaint.
My point is not that it's hard to get Python scripts to run on Arch, my point is that I shouldn't have to do any work at all.
"Until the conventions described in this PEP are more widely adopted, having python invoke python2 will remain the recommended option."
"This feature [python2 symlink] will first appear in the default installation process in CPython 2.7.3."
Python 2.7.3 was released in August 9, 2012, slightly over one month ago. That means that if you are running a Python 2 that is more than one month old, you won't have the symlink unless you make it yourself, or your distribution provides one for you.
My point is not that it's hard to get Python scripts to run on Arch, my point is that I shouldn't have to do any work at all.
You can see a summary: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ (note it's not yet been accepted)
"Until the conventions described in this PEP are more widely adopted, having python invoke python2 will remain the recommended option."
"This feature [python2 symlink] will first appear in the default installation process in CPython 2.7.3."
Python 2.7.3 was released in August 9, 2012, slightly over one month ago. That means that if you are running a Python 2 that is more than one month old, you won't have the symlink unless you make it yourself, or your distribution provides one for you.