python-is-python-2 package... something new?

Question

I have upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from Ubuntu 20.04 (dev branch) and I have noticed that sudo apt install python installs python-is-python-2 instead of python2 (from Ubuntu 18.04) or python-minimal (from Ubuntu 20.04 dev).

Is this something new? Is this package different in any way with respect to the other two? As of now, the installation is complete and I notice that python2 opens up Python 2.7 in the terminal.

Answer 1

This no longer happens in ubuntu 20.04. The python-is-python2 package no longer exists (but there is python-is-python3 which does the same thing but makes the python command call python3).

If you still need python2 to be the default for the python command you can do something like:

sudo ln -s /bin/python2.7 /usr/bin/python

This can be important if you are using something like repo which doesn't support python3 (and maybe never will). See here.