ANNOUNCE: Optik 1.4.1

[Greg Ward]

Optik 1.4.1
===========

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) 2001-2003 Gregory P. Ward.  All rights reserved.


CHANGES IN OPTIK 1.4
--------------------

  * Changed to use the new textwrap module included with Python 2.3.
    Includes a copy of textwrap.py for use with older Python versions.

  * Set __all__ in each of the optik.* modules, to make life easier for
    optik/__init__.py.

  * Rewrote the test suite to use PyUnit, and added some new tests
    that revealed some long-hidden bugs.  Fixed those bugs.
    (Thanks to Johannes Gijsbers for doing all the work!)

  * For versions of Python with builtin True and False values (ie.
    Python 2.2.1 and later), make store_true/store_false use them.

  * Add forwards-compatibility 'optparse' module, so scripts can
    import from 'optparse' and work under base Python 2.3, or
    under older Pythons with Optik 1.4.1 or later installed.

-- 
Greg Ward <gward@python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
Rules for Urban Cycling, #1:
Green means go; yellow means go like hell; red means proceed with caution.