My recent proposal to add Optik to the standard library unearthed a few other interesting, competing solutions. Guido didn't want python-dev to drown in a sea of getopt-related traffic, so the getopt-sig@python.org mailing list has been created.

The goal of the list is to determine a suitable module for high-powered command-line parsing to be included in the standard library with Python 2.3. Proposals currently on the table include:

* Optik (by me; see optik.sourceforge.net)

* arglist.py (by Ben Wolfson; see http://home.uchicago.edu/~wolfson/Python/arglist.py)

* an unnamed, off-the-cuff implementation by Russ Cox, based on Plan 9's C macros for option parsing -- see http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-February/019982.html

If you are interested in getting something more powerful and easier-to-use than the current getopt module into Python's standard library, please join the list:

http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/getopt-sig

If you just want to state an opinion (eg. "Optik rules", "Optik sucks", "Russ' idea looks good to me"), please post it to getopt-sig@python.org -- you don't have to join the list to do that. Anyone who has emailed me (or the optik-users list) their opinion of Optik in the past should feel free to reiterate that opinion on getopt-sig@python.org.

Greg