[Python-Dev] PEP 389: argparse - new command line parsing module

[Guido van Rossum]

On a tangent -- a use case that I see happening frequently but which
is pretty poorly supported by optparse is a command-line that has a
bunch of general flags, then a 'subcommand name', and then more flags,
specific to the subcommand. Most here are probably familiar with this
pattern from SVN, Hg, and other revision control systems (P4 anyone?)
with a rich command-line interface. There are some variants, e.g.
whether global and subcommand-specific flags may overlap, and whether
flags may follow positional args (Hg and SVN seem to differ here a
bit).

I've helped write at least two tools at Google that have this
structure; both used different approaches, and neither was
particularly easy to get right. Getting all the different --help
output to make sense was mostly a manual process. (E.g. "foo --help"
should print the general flags and the list of known subcommands,
whereas "foo --help subcommand" should print flags and other usage
info about the specific subcommand.) Also switching out to different
calls based on the subcommand should/might be part of this.

I would be willing to live with a third option parser in the stdlib if
it solved this problem well.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)