> On my Centos system, getopt ignores leading and trailing whitespace on long options.

This is not related to how getopt_long in C works with leading and trailing whitespace on long options, but is related to how command-line utility getopt parses a list of long options.

My answer: if you don't want a space in your long_option, don't put a space in there. There is no a bug in Python, and the patch just complicates the code in attempt to fix one particular user error.