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

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Sun Apr 18 21:33:28 CEST 2010

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:31 AM, Tobias Herp <Tobias.Herp at gmx.de> wrote:

To put it short: Argparse should simply do this like optparse does already. I.e., use '--version', '--help' and '-h' by default, but not '-v'. [snip] What happened was the following: Completely unnecessarily, the 'version' constructor argument is now deprecated. [snip] The deprecation of the 'version' argument press-gangs people to replace it by  parser.addargument('--version', action='version',  version='',    # the only common part  help="show program's version number and exit")

What Tobias has conveniently omitted is that there was not much agreement on what the default behavior of the version flag should be. Things that were proposed:

I put up a poll and asked people for feedback on some of the alternatives:

http://www.vizu.com/res/Grab-bag/argparse/poll-results.html?n=192933

And it was far from a consensus. Given the lack of consensus, the many different options people thought were the "right" way to do things, and the fact that the action='version' approach allows people to customize the flags to whatever they want, I stick by my decision to deprecate the constructor argument and redirect people to the more flexible add_argument approach. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

In general, I should say that I'm not opposed to changing the behavior in Python trunk, even if it causes a bit of backwards incompatibility. But I'd really like a consensus about the correct behavior, and so far I have not seen that.

Steve

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

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