Comment 1 for bug 787851

The 'python' executable has always been used to refer to python 2.x. Some bleeding-edge distributions have moved to 'python' referring to python3 - in this case you should make sure to manually invoke all python2 code with the 'python2' binary.

We're still using 'python' and not 'python2' because the latter isn't available in a lot of older distributions.

See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/ for background.