ANNOUNCE: Optik 1.4 released

[Greg Ward]

Optik 1.4
=========

Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line
parsing library for Python.  Using Optik, you can add intelligent,
sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very
little overhead.

Here's an example of using Optik to add some command-line options to a
simple script:

  from optik import OptionParser
  [...]
  parser = OptionParser()
  parser.add_option("-f", "--file",
                    action="store", type="string", dest="filename",
                    help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE")
  parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet",
                    action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=1,
                    help="don't print status messages to stdout")

  (options, args) = parser.parse_args()

With these few lines of code, users of your script can now do the
"usual thing" on the command-line:

  <yourscript> -f outfile --quiet
  <yourscript> -qfoutfile
  <yourscript> --file=outfile -q
  <yourscript> --quiet --file outfile

(All of these result in
  options.filename == "outfile"
  options.verbose == 0
...just as you might expect.)

Even niftier, users can run one of
  <yourscript> -h
  <yourscript> --help
and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's optons:

  usage: <yourscript> [options]

  options:
    -h, --help           show this help message and exit
    -fFILE, --file=FILE  write report to FILE
    -q, --quiet          don't print status messages to stdout

That's just a taste of the flexibility Optik gives you in parsing your
command-line.  See the documentation included in the package for
details.


AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AVAILABILITY
-------------------------------

Optik was written by Greg Ward <gward@python.net>

The latest version of Optik can be found at
  http://optik.sourceforge.net/

Copyright (c) 2001 Gregory P. Ward.  All rights reserved.


CHANGES IN OPTIK 1.4
--------------------

[editorial note: most significant code changes in Optik 1.4 were
 made by David Goodger; except as noted below, David should be credited
 with everything in this list!  I just rearranged some of his changes,
 renamed a few thing, and put out the release.  --Greg]

  * Factored the help-formatting code out of OptionParser into
    some new classes (HelpFormatter and subclasses) in help.py.  This
    should make it a lot easier to customize how help is formatted.

  * Added the notion of "option groups": an OptionParser can now
    contain several option groups, each which contains several options.
    The main purpose of this is to enable sensibly-grouped help output,
    but it opens up all sorts of interesting (and largely untested)
    possibilities for code to throw whole option groups around instead
    of individual options.  Added two new classes: OptionGroup, and
    OptionContainer for code common to OptionParser and OptionGroup.
    (OptionContainer should be invisible to programmers using Optik).

  * Added the 'description' attribute and set_description() method to
    both OptionParser and OptionGroup (actually OptionContainer, but
    I just said that class was invisible).  Again, this is to make
    help output more useful.

  * Made it easier for OptionParser subclasses to decide whether
    they should have the standard "help" option, by moving the logic
    from class level to the _populate_option_list() method.

  * Added the "choice" option type, which is just a string type
    constrained to a fixed set of values.

  * Added method get_default_values() to OptionParser.

  * Rewrote how OptionParser recognizes abbreviated long
    options; removed a redundant internal instance attribute.

  * Simplify parsing logic in OptionParser a tad by relocating a loop
    and renaming _process_arg() to _process_args().

-- 
Greg Ward <gward@python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
Jesus Saves -- and you can too, by redeeming these valuable coupons!