[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le mardi 15 septembre 2009 à 12:03 -0400, Collin Winter a écrit :
> 
> Did you read what Laura wrote about her experience with optparse?
> [...]

Sure I did. These are still fringe use cases compared to the common uses
of an option parser. Perhaps argparse has a couple of nifty features
that make things slightly easier in the common cases, but the difference
doesn't seem earth-shattering to me.

The point is, optparse does useful things and it does them reasonably
well. You can't deny that, and talking about how that other library does
many other things is not a satisfying answer to the people whose code
you're gonna break.

> It's also worth noting that optparse continues to have bugs filed
> against it, so it is not perfect or low-maintenance in that respect:
> http://bugs.python.org/issue2931 is an interesting example.

Well, of course it has bugs filed against it (which software hasn't?).
The point is that there are few of them.
And, yes, being more unicode-compliant would be nice (although the bug
should be retried on py3k, because this whole discussion probably
targets 3.x anyway, not 2.x).