Logged In: YES 
user_id=791932

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.