[Python-Dev] Python 2.7b1 and argparse's version action

[Ian Bicking]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>
> wrote:
> > Steven Bethard <steven.bethard <at> gmail.com> writes:
> >> Note
> >> that even though I agree with you that "-v/--version" is probably not
> >> the best choice, in the poll[2] 11% of people still wanted this.
> >
> > This strikes me as a small minority.
>
> Agreed, but it's also the current behavior, and has been since the
> beginning of argparse. Note that no one complained about it until
> Tobias filed the issue in Nov 06, 2009.
>

I encountered this problem within minutes of first using argparse.  Of
course I'm very familiar with optparse and the standard optparse
instantiation flies off my fingers without thinking.  But then there's going
to be a lot more people with that background using argparse once it is in
the standard library -- people who don't really care about argparse or
optparse but just want to use the standard thing.  I don't see any reason
why argparse can't simply do exactly what optparse did.  There's nothing
wrong with it.  It's what many people expect.  We should just defer to
tradition when the choice isn't important (it's getting to be a very bike
shed thread).

Somewhat relatedly, what is the plan for past and future argparse releases?
Michael Foord for instance is releasing unittest improvements in parallel
under the name unittest2.  I believe there is strong disfavor with releasing
packages that overlap with the standard library, so continuing to release
argparse under the name argparse will cause problems.  I would hate to see
release complications or confusions keep argparse from seeing future
development.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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