[Python-ideas] Options parsing in the Tornado Web Server

[Guido van Rossum]

Hey Bret!

I still see your name in our code base a lot... :-)

The Google flags code has a fundamentally different use case than the
typical argument parsing -- thanks for pointing this out. In fact, the
two use cases are so different that there is barely any overlap. (What
Google does with flags is more typically done with environment
variables, although I totally understand that that didn't work for
you.) Maybe the discussion about flags parsing (which is apparently
happening on a list I'm not on :-) is helped by clearly distinguishing
the two styles.

--Guido

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Bret Taylor <btaylor at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am Bret from FriendFeed, author of a lot of Tornado.
>
> We modeled it after the Google option parsing (http://code.google.com/
> p/google-gflags/). The main distinction is that every module declares
> its own options, so your main() function doesn't need to be aware of
> all of the options used by the transitive
> closure of modules in your server. As anyone who has worked on large
> systems knows, passing around options and defaults becomes a big pain
> after your number of modules increases above 100 or so.
>
> That said, I think our options parsing works well for individual
> projects, but you would get lots of naming conflicts if it were
> adopted in any official capacity by Python given the options all have
> global scope, so I agree with Guido that optparse is probably better
> as an official module. It certainly was much more useful to us than
> optparse from an operational standpoint, though.
>
> Bret
>
> On Sep 10, 1:44 pm, Guido van Rossum <gu... at python.org> wrote:
>> That's not particularly more expressive than what optparse gives you
>> today, except for the use of a function with a side effect on a magic
>> global (how the heck did options.port suddenly get a value?!) and the
>> potential for confusing tornado.options with tornado.options.options.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Andrey Fedorov <anfedo... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I remember seeing a bit of discussion about improving Python's default
>> > options parsing... Tornado's seems very impressive [1]:
>>
>> >> from tornado.options import define, options
>>
>> >> define("port", default=8888, help="run on the given port", type=int)
>>
>> >> print options.port
>>
>> > What does everyone think?
>>
>> > - Andrey
>>
>> > 1.
>> >http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9a8bd2fb6fd6279be16d6f0a2e57e...
>>
>> --
>> --Guido van Rossum (home page:http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)