You could file a feature request to change the -3 option into a configurable shortcut (there’s no -2 option anymore), but the change in configuration from the old launcher is intentional, so there ought to be no assumption of all configuration options transferring over (notably, you also can’t create your own list of shebang commands anymore).
A major component of the new install manager is to simplify the things we have to support as an upstream team. “Generic shortcut for all sorts of app launches” isn’t something we want to own, so we’re way more focused on getting and using our Python builds. Perhaps there is a need for a tool on Windows to have shortcuts for all sorts of other apps that is configurable like this, but we’re not the ones who maintain it.
Reasonable enough though it does raise a question given the removal of -2 and the unlikeliness of -4 coming to be is there a reason to maintain -3 if you’re not concerned with backwards compatibility?
Maintaining -3 is a bit unjustified, yeah, though I suspect there’s a lot of muscle memory that would be most upset if we broke it.
The actual behaviour is that -3<anything> gets rewritten as -V:3<anything> and interpreted that way, which preserves -3.14 etc., along with adding the full range of prerelease and platform selectors “for free”.
Interpreting -3 as -V:3 comes along with this directly, and so adding an alternate interpretation of that one variant is new work. Simply ignoring -3 altogether (while still handling -3<something>) is probably not unreasonable, though it’s likely to cause other peoples’ workflows to have to change, so it’s really hard to say which should win here.
Of all the bad ideas that seem to flow freely into the sea of bad decisions that Python is, this pymanager thing is the worst in the last few years.
This thing is disruptive, I had several coexisting python versions due to sofware that require specific versions (qBittorrent plugins that require old versions, stable diffusion webui, which requires 3.10.6) and they were working fine. Now that this pymanager thing is here they’re conflicting. I either run stable diffusion OR qbittorrent webseach, OR the latest 3.14 release for example. Having all installed at the same time and only one will work. This didn’t happen before pymanager came along.
Please provide constructive feedback, if you don’t explain your setup and errors nothing can be done to fix it.
Obviously no one want to break people’s workflows, but there are millions of workflows out in the world and no way to know about them all, let alone test them.
Do you know how they are discovering the correct version of Python? You’ve never been able to do it all on PATH, so they must have been using either a full executable path (still works) or the registry entries (still works). In addition, they can now also look for python3.10.exe on PATH (previously didn’t work, now does) which a lot of POSIX-only software will try to do. The only way they should be breaking is if they hard-coded the default install directory, which was always a bad idea.
A bit more info about what these plugins need would be very helpful. Otherwise, as Damian says, we can’t offer anything other than apologies that your software didn’t handle the change well.