Hi, all, I notice that Python 2.7 beta 1 now contains the argparse module, which might be a good thing. The code has been cleaned up, too.
But there is still one issue with argparse: Completely unnecessarily, the 'version' constructor argument is now deprecated. This fact doesn't solve any problem I can think of; the only effect is to make programming more cumbersome, and it is /one more/ difference to optparse. The 'version' argument is a perfectly reasonable way to provide a script with a simple version information feature. Of course, it should only define the '--version' argument; it *must not* define '-v' for this purpose, since this is commonly used for verbosity. I have lots of scripts which use optparse, and every single one uses the version argument. I consider this a matter of good style. Of course, if a more fancy version information is needed, it is perfectly possible to just omit the version argument during creation and build a special 'version' action, e.g. reporting the versions of all imported modules. No deprecation warnings are needed for this. *Before Python 2.7 getting a production release*, IMNSHO the following changes should be applied to argparse.py: - removal of the deprecation warnings - removal of the default usage of '-v' with the version information facility This is a very simple thing to do; I'd happily provide a patch. Just for the records, this is what optparse does: - it defines -h and --help for the help (unless suppressed) - it defines --version for the version (if version argument given) This is how it should be. This is how the vast majority of *x tools looks like. (well, some use '-h' for something like "host" or "human readable"; but just a few strange misfits use -v instead of -V for the version.) No reason to change this behaviour. What do you think? -- Cheers, Tobias -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
