Raymond Hettinger <rhettin...@users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:
Xavier, I think these efforts are misguided in several ways: * Many of the undocumented command-line interfaces are intentionally undocumented -- they were there for the convenience of the developer for exercising the module as it was being developed and are not part of the official API. Most are not production quality and would have been done much differently if that had been the intent. * The standard library's primary purpose is to be a library for use in user programs, not to serve as a suite of applications. We do have a few applications such as pydoc that assist development, but that is not what we want to do for most modules. Real apps need more features than we usually offer and they need much faster development cycles than supported by our 18-24 month release cycle. * To the extent the standard library serves as a set of examples, that is just side benefit. There are other ways to make code specifically for examples (we include tons of examples in the documentation; we had a Demos directory; there is the wiki; and there is the ASPN Cookbook site; etc) * David Murray is correct is pointing-out that converting to argparse risks changing the semantics and possibly breaking someone's existing uses of the current interface. * Though argparse is the shiny new kid on the block and it should be used for new code, there is no imperative to go change all existing command-line scripts. We haven't even done that same exercise for the new string formatting. * All that being said, there are some exceptions and it make may sense to document the interface in some where we really do want a command-line app. I'll look at any patches you want to submit, but try to not go wild turning the library into a suite of applications. For the most part, that is not what the standard library is about. ---------- assignee: docs@python -> rhettinger nosy: +rhettinger priority: normal -> low _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue11260> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
