R. David Murray added the comment: It may or may not be too old to deserve comments, but it is too old to do anything about it. This can't change for backward compatibility reasons, and since optparse is deprecated in favor of argparse it isn't getting any new features. We still need to apply the doc patch, though...(makes note to self). ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue5088> _______________________________________