The first example, and several subsequent examples later on in the
optparse docs, use 'default' as an argument, even though it's apparently
deprecated in favor of set_defaults. At the risk of overstating the
obvious, this seems to be inconsistent. Even the section on defaults
http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html#default-values uses the
'default' keyword without stressing its deprecation. It might make more
sense to leave it out of all of the examples altogether, replacing it
with the appropriate set_defaults invocations.