July 20, 2010
4:22 a.m.
'cmdoption' is a directive, while 'option' is inline markup. Therefore I wouldn't say they're completely similar, just meant for different purposes. Both a directive and inline markup is useful for describing "official python executable options/flags". Regarding per-module options, I'm not sure special markup is needed at all. So a policy has to be define regarding the correct usage of these directives/markups, and probably documented in Doc/documenting/markup.rst
I've done that now in r82961.
As per your recommendation in the updated documentation guide, I have fixed the ReST docs of stdlib modules that used :option:, to use code markup (``) instead. I've opened issue 9312 for this and submitted a patch. Eli