[New-bugs-announce] [issue3084] sys.exit() called from optparse - bad, bad, bad

[Skip Montanaro]

New submission from Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com>:

This seems like a bug in optparse.OptionParser:

    def exit(self, status=0, msg=None):
        if msg:
            sys.stderr.write(msg)
        sys.exit(status)

    def error(self, msg):
        """error(msg : string)

        Print a usage message incorporating 'msg' to stderr and exit.
        If you override this in a subclass, it should not return -- it
        should either exit or raise an exception.
        """
        self.print_usage(sys.stderr)
        self.exit(2, "%s: error: %s\n" % (self.get_prog_name(), msg))

By default I think it should raise an exception when it encounters an error,
not exit.  Programmers shouldn't be forced to subclass code in the standard
library to get recommended practice.

If you feel this behavior can't be changed in 2.6 it should at least be
corrected in 3.0.

Skip

----------
messages: 68030
nosy: skip.montanaro
severity: normal
status: open
title: sys.exit() called from optparse - bad, bad, bad

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue3084>
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