Arch Linux

The python2-free claim probably applies to the master branch. Our package uses the latest stable release. On my system, I've got:

$ grep python2 `pacman -Qlq inkscape` 2>/dev/null | wc -l
168

So quite a few things apparently still rely on python2. Cheers.

This is possibly self-inflicted by the PKGBUILD: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/inkscape#n31

If you grep for python2 in the 0.92.4 source code, you only find Python 2 for macOS and Windows / part of buildsystem (?) - and that's probably optional. If you grep in the share/ folder for inkscape, there's not a single mention of python2. All scripts use a `#!/usr/bin/env python` shebang, which implies Python 3 support.
(Edit: This paragraph is wrong! python implies python2, not python3)

However, according to the wiki, extensions using a certain file were still broken: inkex.py (Also see: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Extension_Interpreters#Selecting_a_specific_interpreter_version_.28via_preferences_file.29 ). That was only fixed 1 month ago (See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/merge_requests/568 ), and is not fixed in the current stable version.

The extensions repo linked above appears to be used for future major versions (and is also Python 3 compatible).

So on the next update (either 1.0 or 0.92.5) this package can probably be (safely) migrated to Python 3.
Even now, it could probably be migrated to Python 3, with optional Python 2 for certain extensions.

From https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/merge_requests/568/diffs 109 .py files were changed for python3 compatibility excluding the unshipped share/extensions/test/render_barcode.test.py
that leaves 108 of the 188 .py files shipped by inkscape affected.
Edit:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ covers the interpretation of /usr/bin/env python

You're correct!

I remember introducing those sed lines in the PKGBUILD because, as you point out, many scripts using `#!/usr/bin/env python` expect python2. I'm glad to hear those scripts have since been ported to python3 upstream and look forward to deprecating python2 as soon as an upstream release supports it. For now I think having python3 for most scripts and python2 in optdepends would introduce too much additional complexity for too little gain. Cheers.

> that leaves 108 of the 188 .py files shipped by inkscape affected.

My understanding is that while only a minority of extensions were modified in that diff, those that were not were already compatible with Python 3. I could be wrong about this but we could always check with upstream about the status of their Python 3 conversion before making any changes here. If I'm correct about this, we should be good to go as soon as a release with #568 lands. (When I posted this bug report, I mistakenly believed it had already landed since Arch has a release of Inkscape that postdates its merge into the 0.92.x branch.)

That was what I was intending to convey 80 of the 188 python extension files are python 3 compatible as they are not touched by 568.

Thank you for your detailed explanations. We will now wait for the next upstream release. Feel free to mark the package as out-of-date with a note on python3 support when it comes out. Cheers.