System python on CentOS 8 is not "python"

[IBBoard]

Affected Puppet, Ruby, OS and module versions/distributions

• Puppet: 6.11.1
• Ruby: 2.5.7p206
• Distribution: CentOS 8
• Module version: 4.0.0

How to reproduce (e.g Puppet code you use)

        class { 'python':
                ensure => 'present',
                pip => 'present',
                virtualenv => 'present',
                use_epel => false,
        }

What are you seeing

Error: Execution of '/bin/dnf -d 0 -e 1 -y install python' returned 1: Error: Unable to find a match                                                        
Error: /Stage[main]/Python::Install/Package[python]/ensure: change from 'purged' to 'present' failed: Execution of '/bin/dnf -d 0 -e 1 -y install python' retu
rned 1: Error: Unable to find a match                                                          

What behaviour did you expect instead

Python 2.7 is now EOL and so CentOS 8 are pushing a lot of Python 3. Because of the long lifespan of a CentOS release, they've only got versioned Python (python2 and python3) and python as a package doesn't exist.

"system" should be Python 3 on CentOS 8 (and other distros that have similar behaviour)

This would also solve the problem of installing Python as v3 (rather than system) and then having to specify v3 for all virtualenvs as well.

[ju5t]

The package pip doesn't exist either. And it's likely there will be other problems.

Unfortunately my time is very limited so I can't address this myself, but it would be great if this module could include CentOS 8 support.