python
I'm just wondering if it is okay install the package python3.2 from ubuntu's repositories?. I have been so unlucky with ubuntu lately, that I'm afraid to do anything because everything seems to break my system.
The point is that I want to learn python 3, but without breaking the python dependencies of my system.
sudo aptitude install -s python3.2 doesn't show any conflicts, but still I prefer to ask.
Thank you in advance.
Since many programs and libraries rely on Python 2.6 (or python 2.7 in 11.04), and since python 2.x and 3.x are incompatible, you can't upgrade - you can only install python3 alongside python 2.6:
Python 3.1
Luckily, the stable release of Python 3 (3.1.2 at the time of writing this) is provided in the repositories. Just install the python3-all package.
Your interpreter will be /usr/bin/python3 instead of /usr/bin/python.
You can also now type python3 in your terminal when you want to launch Py3 instead of Py2.
Python 3.2
You can, download any version of the python sources from python.org and run
./configure
make
sudo make altinstall
To be able to compile the python source, you'll need a few packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libncursesw5-dev libreadline5-dev libssl-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libbz2-dev
The altinstall option will install the other version of python alongside your existing ones:
It makes sense to, instead of downloading the sources, check out the latest development release from the python dev repository every so often:
svn checkout http://svn.python.org/projects/python/branches/py3k
This will give you the very latest development, unstable, version. you can then cd py3k/ and do the above compilation procedure.
For this, svn needs to be installed of course.
Use the Deadsnakes PPA, which includes a range of Python versions packaged for a range of Ubuntu versions, including 3.2 for raring.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.2
Best Answer
Python 2.x and 3.x happily coexist on ubuntu. All python scripts not specifically launched with python 3 will default to python 2 though.
If you're want to test 3 packages I would use something like Aptana where you can select which python dist you want to test under.
Credit to James Henstridge on suggesting the pseudo-package python3 over a specific version number.