[Python-Dev] PEP 389: argparse - new command line parsing module (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Mon Sep 28 17:08:48 CEST 2009

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Hello,

I am neutral on the idea of adding argparse. However, I'm -1 on deprecating optparse. It is very widely used (tons of scripts use it), and ok for many uses; deprecating it is totally unhelpful and gratuitous. You can add me to that camp as well: +0 on adding argparse -1 on deprecating wide-used modules such as getopt and optparse Note that the last -1 only applies to the module APIs, not the code in those modules. If argparse provides an API compatibility layer for getopt and optparse, the original code of getopt and optparse could go without problem, IMHO, leaving only the mostly empty modules together with compatibility layers. OTOH, as discussed on the stdlib SIG list, those two modules hardly ever require any maintenance, so keeping them as they are is certainly an option as well. Although as also discussed on the stdlib-sig there is also a cost to leaving unmaintained and unneeded modules in the standard library. As we are 'end-of-lifing' Python 2.X there seems to be little point in going down the deprecation route (there won't be enough releases to ever get to module removal) but discussion about the standard library in situations like this is badly needed for 3.X.

Certainly a slow deprecation procedure, as suggested by Steven, is warranted.

Michael

-- http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/ http://www.voidspace.org.uk/blog

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