[IPython-dev] Helping battle testing the newapp branch

Robert Kern robert.kern at gmail.com
Tue Jun 21 12:47:09 EDT 2011


On 6/21/11 11:20 AM, Min RK wrote:
>
> On Jun 21, 2011, at 9:12, Robert Kern<robert.kern at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> On 6/21/11 10:23 AM, Min RK wrote:
>>>
>>> On Jun 21, 2011, at 1:05, Fernando Perez<fperez.net at gmail.com>   wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 9:22 PM, MinRK<benjaminrk at gmail.com>   wrote:
>>>>> newapp has been merged into master.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>> BTW, I think we should add back the (ugly, I know) special-case of
>>>> honoring -pylab with a single dash.  We've talked about this before,
>>>> while it's ugly, this is written in *many* places, including books and
>>>> published papers, as the way to start ipython with plotting/numerical
>>>> support.  I think it's worth the friendliness to users who arrive via
>>>> that path to have that option just work, even if it means an ugly two
>>>> lines of code special-casing '-pylab' in sys.argv...
>>>
>>> It doesn't have to be ugly - we could easily allow flags to be specified with one or two leading '-'.  Currently, one '-' cannot be valid, so it is safe to allow it.
>>
>> Well, '-pylab' gets parsed the same as '-p ylab'. Maybe just add an alias "ylab"
>> for the pylab profile?
>
> -pylab is rejected as an invalid argument, just as anything prefixed with just one leading '-'. Flags currently require a '--' prefix, but that is entirely artificial. Allowing the shorter leading '-' is a trivial change, and might ease the transition for people.

Well, yes. Changing "-i" to "--i" is just gratuitous, as is disallowing the 
short aliases for "-p/--profile" and "-l/--log". It makes IPython more 
non-standard in addition to backwards-incompatible. The manual parsing in 
KeyValueConfigLoader exacerbates this (e.g. it seems to require 
"--profile=scipy" rather than "--profile scipy" like most applications would 
accept).

I know it's late in the game to be commenting on this, but that's an unpleasant 
change. I see an ArgParseConfigLoader, but it seems unfinished and unused.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco




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