ANNOUNCE: Optik 1.5

[Greg Ward]

Optik 1.5 is finally available.  I won't bore you with the usual
song-and-dance -- see http://optik.sourceforge.net/ for the marketing,
documentation, downloads, source code, etc.

Here's the list of changes since the last release (1.5a2):

  * SF patch #870807: allow users to specify integer option arguments
    in hexadecimal, octal, or binary with leading "0x", "0", or "0b".

  * SF feature #1050184: add 'append_const' action (patch by
    Andrea 'fwyzard' Bocci).

  * Keep going if importing gettext fails (so optparse can be used
    in the Python build process).

And here's the list of other changes since 1.4.1 (all were first
released with Optik 1.5a1 unless otherwise noted):

  * Optik now requires Python 2.2 or later.

  * Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
    "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
    that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.

  * SF bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
    now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
    allows generation of nicer help when using custom types.  Can
    be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).

  * SF bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
    options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.

  * SF feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
    that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
    set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
    HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.

  * SF patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
    targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext().  Also
    added po/ directory for message catalog and translations, so that
    Optik-based applications have a single place to go for translations
    of Optik's built-in messags.  Include translations for Danish and
    German (thanks to Frederik S. Olesen and Martin v. Löwis
    respectively), and partial translations for French (by me).

  * SF bug #878453 (Python): respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
    wrapping help output.

  * SF feature #964317: allow type objects to specify option types;
    allow "str" as an alias for "string".

  * SF feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
    to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
    (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)

  * Added HTML-formatted docs to the source distribution (in addition
    to the reStructuredText source files).

  * Added three new examples: custom_source.py, custom_type.py, and
    no_help.py.

  * Remove the old, broken "ignore" option conflict handler -- was
    only needed for compatibility with Optik 1.1.

  * Move documentation into docs/ directory, and write a script
    (mkpydoc) to automatically convert it to LaTeX for the Python
    standard library manual.  Many documentation improvements.
    (1.5a2)

  * SF #997100: attempt to avoid triggering a FutureWarning in
    __repr__() when using id() with "%x" (1.5a2).

  * SF #1048725: fix typo in Values.__eq__() introduced in 1.5a1.

  * Fix test script so it plays nice when being run with other test
    scripts (as in the Python test suite) (1.5a2).
 

-- 
Greg Ward <gward at python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
I don't believe there really IS a GAS SHORTAGE.. I think it's all just
a BIG HOAX on the part of the plastic sign salesmen -- to sell more numbers!!