Python 3.6 default target reverted on Gentoo

After a long rebuild session yesterday due to the Python 3.6 upgrade, I was not overly impressed when issuing emerge --sync eventually resulted in a proposition to revert yesterdays work:

Gentoo - Python3.5 downgrade

Portage proposing a rebuild.

I canceled the proposed rebuild and had a close look at /usr/portage/profiles/base/make.defaults to confirm that the Python 3.6 defaults had in fact been removed:

BOOTSTRAP_USE="cxx unicode internal-glib split-usr python_targets_python3_5 python_targets_python2_7"

PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_5"
PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_5"

The image seen below was snapped from the official Gentoo ebuild repository and shows the commit message reverting Python 3.6.

Python 3.6 revert message

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/log/profiles/base/make.defaults

There has not been any official announcement regarding the reverting of Python 3.6 so I’ll just add the default targets to my /etc/portage/make.conf until more information becomes available.

PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_6"
PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_6"

I’ll likely need to handle a few packages manually again, but that’s currently less of a hassle than doing the complete rebuild. Hey, at least Fail2ban got updated today :-)