ANNOUNCE: Optik 1.3 released

[Greg Ward]

Optik 1.3
=========

Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line
parsing library for Python.  Using Optik, you can add intelligent,
sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very
little overhead.

Here's an example of using Optik to add some command-line options to a
simple script:

  from optik import OptionParser
  [...]
  parser = OptionParser()
  parser.add_option("-f", "--file",
                    action="store", type="string", dest="filename",
                    help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE")
  parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet",
                    action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=1,
                    help="don't print status messages to stdout")

  (options, args) = parser.parse_args()

With these few lines of code, users of your script can now do the
"usual thing" on the command-line:

  <yourscript> -f outfile --quiet
  <yourscript> -qfoutfile
  <yourscript> --file=outfile -q
  <yourscript> --quiet --file outfile

(All of these result in
  options.filename == "outfile"
  options.verbose == 0
...just as you might expect.)

Even niftier, users can run one of
  <yourscript> -h
  <yourscript> --help
and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's optons:

  usage: <yourscript> [options]

  options:
    -h, --help           show this help message and exit
    -fFILE, --file=FILE  write report to FILE
    -q, --quiet          don't print status messages to stdout

That's just a taste of the flexibility Optik gives you in parsing your
command-line.  See the documentation included in the package for
details.


AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AVAILABILITY
-------------------------------

Optik was written by Greg Ward <gward@python.net>

The latest version of Optik can be found at
  http://optik.sourceforge.net/

Copyright (c) 2001 Gregory P. Ward.  All rights reserved.


CHANGES IN OPTIK 1.3
--------------------

  * Fixed a couple of lurking bugs found by PyChecker.

  * You can now get away with not supplying an option's type,
    no matter the action: Optik now assumes a default type of "string".

  * You can now get away with not supplying an option's destination:
    Optik now derives a default destination from the first long option,
    or the first short option if no long options were given.  Eg. an
    option string "--foo-bar" has the default destination 'foo_bar'.

  * Refactored both Option's and OptionParser's constructors to
    make life easier for people extending Optik.

  * Added the "examples/" subdirectory -- this is a repository of
    examples of extending and using Optik; the goal is to provide
    canonical implementations of various features that I don't want to
    add to Optik proper, but that are occasionally requested.  (Also,
    this gives me a good place to test how Optik's extensibility.)

  * Added support for long and complex option types, mainly for
    completeness (patch by Matthew Mueller).

  * Added make_option() as an alias for the Option constructor, because
    someday there might be many Option classes (in which case
    make_option() will become a factory function).

-- 
Greg Ward - geek-at-large                               gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
Clarke's Law, redux:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from a rigged demo.