The attached patch implements long option support for
Python. It changes the optstring found in
Modules/main.c, specifying brackets for the long name
of a corresponding option name. The patch is backward
compatible in that it doesn't change the behaviour of
_PyOS_GetOpt for any old format string, except on
[:()], which are explicitly excluded for matching an
option. This shouldn't break any code, though.

The patch is against Python 2.4.3.

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The attached patch is against the current subversion trunk,
and implements long options with possible arguments after an
=-sign. It has partial matching for options, erroring out on
ambiguous matches of the command line arguments.

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Please update the patch to follow Python C style guidelines
(PEP 7), especially use 8-space tabs to indent.

Also, it might be good to send a copyright assignment to the
PSF for a patch of this magnitude.

Otherwise, I think that this is a desirable feature, at
least for --help and --version.

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I'll redo the patch with vim now, emacs doesn't like doing 8
spaces indents, at least as far as I can get it configured...

Anyway, I assign the copyright to any code contained in this
patch to the PSF.

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Final patch which should conform to PEP-7 completely.

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I actually wonder what the rationale for this patch is. The
command line options of Python seem very clear to me; I
don't see the need for long options.

This should be discussed on python-dev.

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The rationale behind this patch is to enable python to
answer to --version and --help, which are pretty much
standard command-line options with GNU utilities, and
increasingly common amongst BSD utilities. I developed this
patch, answering to a request on c.l.p where people were
asking for Python to answer to --version, and thought I
could generalize it a bit so that long options can also be
used for other arguments.

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I just posted a mail to python-dev explaining my rationale
behind this patch. Maybe you could answer there...

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The latest patch takes into account all constructive ideas
that have been proposed on python-dev for this enhancement.

It implements /<opt> support on Windows for long options,
and adds ? as a possible option to get help.

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Small extension to completely conform to Microsoft long-opt
semantics:

--<name>=<arg>

is equivalent to:

/<name>:<arg>

under Windows with the latest patch.

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Rejecting as per python-dev discussion. There was a
pronouncement from Guido that only --help, --version and /?
for Win should be added.