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

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 05:56:03 CEST 2009

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 8:49 PM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org> wrote:

2009/9/27 Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com>:

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org> wrote:

2009/9/27 Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com>:

The first release where any real deprecation message would show up is Python 3.4, more than 3 years away. If you think 3 years isn't long enough for people to be over the Python 3 transition, let's stick in another version in there and make it 4.5 years.

So, why even bother deprecating it if nobody is going to see the warnings? I feel like I'm repeating the PEP, but here it is again anyway. There will be messages in the docs and pending deprecation warnings (which don't show up by default but can be requested) starting in Python 2.7 and 3.2. Regular deprecation warnings wouldn't show up until Python 3.4, 3 years away. This compromise was intended exactly to address the issue you brought up about people getting over the Python 3 transition. But that doesn't tell me why we should deprecate optparse, when it may work perfectly well for some people.

Because it's basically unmaintained, and anything you can do in optparse you can do in argparse with almost identical syntax. So encouraging people to move from getopt and optparse to argparse is a net gain for us as Python maintainers -- that's two fewer modules in the standard library that someone has to take care of bug reports for.

Steve

Where did you get that preposterous hypothesis? Did Steve tell you that? --- The Hiphopopotamus

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