[Python-Dev] some notes from the first part of the lang summit

[Michael Foord]

On 21/02/2010 08:45, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 4:30 AM, Eric Smith<eric at trueblade.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Steven Bethard wrote:
>>      
>>> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 7:50 AM, Brett Cannon<brett at python.org>  wrote:
>>>        
>>>> My notes from the session I led:
>>>>
>>>> + argparse
>>>>
>>>>    - Same issues brought up.
>>>>          
>>> For those of us not at PyCon, what were the issues?
>>>        
>> I think they were all related to deprecation of optparse, not anything to do
>> with argparse itself. I don't recall any specific decision on deprecation,
>> but my sense was that optparse will be around for a long, long time. There
>> was also a quick discussion on maybe implementing optparse using argparse,
>> then getting rid of the existing optparse. Maybe you can comment on that.
>>      
> Maybe the best thing is to make optparse *silently* deprecated, with a
> big hint at the top of its documentation telling new users to use
> argparse instead, but otherwise leaving it in indefinitely for the
> benefit of the many existing users.
>
>    
+1

argparse is a great step forward but there is no need to disrupt 
existing users - just direct new users to the place they should go.

We've done that with a couple of the commonly used but extraneous 
methods in unittest - deprecation via documentation.

Michael

-- 
http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/