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

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Wed Sep 30 03:26:04 CEST 2009

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Keeping getopt around and including a "addgetoptarguments" method in argparse is probably the best of both worlds, in that it allows for relatively straightforward evolution of an application:

1. Start with getopt 2. As the getopt argument parsing gets twisty and arcane and maintaining the help string becomes a nightmare, move to argparse with the "addgetoptarguments" method. 3. Over time, convert more arguments to proper argparse arguments with full documentation.

One thing that wouldn't be good in this transition is that "add_getopt_arguments" can only generate the part of the help string that says "-a" and "--author" exist as options -- it can't add the additional bit of text that says what they do because that's not provided to the getopt API.

I suspect this makes the transition less convenient because with getopt you were probably already manually maintaining a usage message that had at least some of this information, and switching to "add_getopt_arguments" would mean throwing this information away.

Steve

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

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