On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 06:40, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben@gmail.com> wrote:
> .. So a policy has to be define regarding the
> correct usage of these directives/markups, and probably documented in
> Doc/documenting/markup.rst

I wonder if in addition to documenting proper markup you could add an
option to argparse to generate help in ReST format.  I understand that
this will not be immediately useful for trace.py which uses getopt and
getopt does not have enough structured data to generate good help.  On
the other hand, upgrading trace.py to use argparse may not be a bad
idea.

I actually considered switching to argparse when I noticed that trace.py still lives with getopt (personally I've long been using optparse).

However, I wonder what this means for backwards compatibility. Is it valid to switch trace.py to use the newer command-line argument parsing module that's only available in the newest versions of Python? I guess it could be since trace.py is stdlib which always arrives with its relevant version of Python. This *would* mean, however, that trace.py would be incompatible between 2.7 (argparse) and 2.6 (which doesn't have argparse), but I'm not sure how much of a problem this is.

Eli