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 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 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

I can attest as a pkgsrc developer, where we try to build and package software on all sorts of platforms (some old and wacky), that as long as the relevant Pythons build on those platforms (and we tend to make sure they do), I don't foresee any negative impact of your suggested change to ikiwiki. Can't attest for other situations, but am generally biased toward biting future bullets as early as possible. --schmonz

Nobody objected, so it's now python3 for the next release. done --smcv