[stdlib-sig] Maintenance of optparse

[Armin Ronacher]

Hello list,

What started as a joke yesterday in the Bug Tracker and on Twitter now
evolved into a serious consideration.  In case the only reason for
optparse to go away is that it does not have a maintainer I would take
over that task.

In fact I would also implement missing features based on real-world
needs.  That would most likely mean that some of the changes in argparse
would end up in optparse as well.  Furthermore I would release a
Python-independent version on PyPI for compatibility with older Python
versions.

I would take over this task if the following criteria are met:

- argparse would not enter the standard library
- I'm allowed to modernize optparse after a discussion with python-dev
  in a backwards compatible way.
- I'm allowed to refactor the code
- make the i18n support of the module more pluggable which would allow
  specifying a custom translations instance instead of using the global
  gettext function.


Regards,
Armin