[Python-Dev] Python 2.7b1 and argparse's version action (original) (raw)

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Mon Apr 19 04:02:17 CEST 2010

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 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.

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