In the second example to allow usage of the required field for options,
it seems as if you already have all you need to implement the feature
into optparse. I modified it a bit to allow OptionGroups:

class Option(optparse.Option):
	ATTRS = optparse.Option.ATTRS + ['required']

	def _check_required(self):
		if self.required and not self.takes_value():
			raise OptionError(
				"required flag set for option that doesn't take a value",
				 self)

	# Make sure _check_required() is called from the constructor!
	CHECK_METHODS = optparse.Option.CHECK_METHODS + [_check_required]

	def process(self, opt, value, values, parser):
		optparse.Option.process(self, opt, value, values, parser)
		parser.option_seen[self] = 1

class OptionParser(optparse.OptionParser):
	def _init_parsing_state(self):
		optparse.OptionParser._init_parsing_state(self)
		self.option_seen = {}

	def check_values(self, values, args):
		for option in self.option_list + sum((optiongroup.option_list for
optiongroup in self.option_groups), []):
			if isinstance(option, Option) and option.required and not
self.option_seen.has_key(option):
				self.error("%s not supplied" % (option, ))
		return (values, args)

The question: why hasn't your existing example been merged with the
OptionParse code to allow the required field for options?

Feature requests can only go into releases under development.

No guarantees, but if you want to give this a better chance of getting
in a patch against trunk including tests would be a minimum prerequisite.

Alternatively or in addition you could help review argparse for
inclusion into the stdlib (see issue 6247; I know the issue is closed
but it could still be moved forward if enough interest is expressed).

What we are looking for in the way of tests is unit tests to add to
test_optparse.  Another piece that I forgot about that we'll need is a
documentation patch.

Finally, it will be easier to review the patch if you don't make other
changes in the patch.  Your PEP 8 changes are good in principle, but
they make it harder to review the patch.

I have not a single clue how to unit test.

What do you mean by documentation patch? Do you want me to update the
documentation within the file to reflect changes?

Well, if you get check out the current trunk via svn (as described in
the developer's faq linked from http://www.python.org/dev) and you look
at what Lib/test/test_optparse.py currently does, you might find it is
not too hard to add some new cases to test the new code.  Then in
Doc/library/optparse.rst, you make appropriate changes to the
documentation RestructuredTest source code, and post everything in a
single patch.

If you don't want to do all this that's fine, the ticket will sit here
until someone comes along who wants to move it forward ;)

Thanks for taking an interest in this.

I don't think optparse will get this update -- new features should go into argparse instead.