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Author techtonik
Recipients aronacher, bethard, eric.smith, georg.brandl, gregory.p.smith, jnoller, loewis, marklodato, michael.foord, ncoghlan, orsenthil, r.david.murray, rickysarraf, techtonik
Date 2009-12-07.20:32:32
SpamBayes Score 2.220446e-16
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Message-id <1260217955.14.0.343595662456.issue6247@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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Argparse seems to be overloaded with rarely used features. Instead of providing 
API to add these features and allow users copy examples it tends to be an all-in-
one solution that is hard to use due to abundance of specific parameters.

Look at constructor, for example - 
http://argparse.googlecode.com/svn/tags/r101/doc/ArgumentParser.html#usage
{{{
description - Text to display before the argument help.
epilog - Text to display after the argument help.
version - A version number used to add a -v/–version option to the parser.
add_help - Add a -h/–help option to the parser. (default: True)
argument_default - Set the global default value for arguments. (default: None)
parents - A list of :class:ArgumentParser objects whose arguments should also be 
included.
prefix_chars - The set of characters that prefix optional arguments. (default: ‘-
‘)
fromfile_prefix_chars - The set of characters that prefix files from which 
additional arguments should be read. (default: None)
formatter_class - A class for customizing the help output.
conflict_handler - Usually unnecessary, defines strategy for resolving conflicting 
optionals.
prog - Usually unnecessary, the name of the program (default: sys.argv[0])
usage - Usually unnecessary, the string describing the program usage (default: 
generated)
}}}

the only useful arguments by default is 'description' and 'add_help' (which is 
better to see as 'no_help' to turn off default behaviour). 'version' is not 
useful, because it adds '-v' shorthand that is often used for verbosity. 
'prefix_chars' is not useful, because the only sense one may need it is to provide 
windows conventions like '/longarg' for '--longarg' and not '//longarg', but it 
doesn't allow to do so.

Everything else is constructor bloat, and even with such abundance of options it 
still unable to generate usage help prefixed by program name and version - the 
sole feature I miss from optparse.

-1 for now
History
Date User Action Args
2009-12-07 20:32:35techtoniksetrecipients: + techtonik, loewis, georg.brandl, gregory.p.smith, ncoghlan, orsenthil, bethard, eric.smith, aronacher, jnoller, r.david.murray, michael.foord, rickysarraf, marklodato
2009-12-07 20:32:35techtoniksetmessageid: <1260217955.14.0.343595662456.issue6247@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2009-12-07 20:32:33techtoniklinkissue6247 messages
2009-12-07 20:32:32techtonikcreate