[stdlib-sig] should we try to add argparse?

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 14:44, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> Le jeudi 10 septembre 2009 à 17:30 -0400, Barry Warsaw a écrit :
>> Why does deprecation == breaking?
>
> Well, you have to rewrite your code one day. And since optparse is
> *very* widely used, tons of users will be impacted. Python is often used
> as a scripting language, even for small one-off scripts that nobody
> wants or even knows to maintain.
>
> Besides, any spurious message on the standard output breaks things like
> cron scripts, so even the deprecation period can be annoying.
>
> Please do not assume that every Python program is a well-maintained
> application with dedicated full-time developers...
>
>> If you want to continue using optparse, that'll be fine for what?
>> 18-36 months or so?  It's a trivial amount of work to port from
>> optparse to argparse.
>
> Ok, if it's trivial then perhaps I'd reconsider my opinion.
> Is there a compatibility API?

Here is what the docs say for transitioning:
http://argparse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/argparse-vs-optparse.html#upgrading-optparse-code
. Also says why optparse was no longer being extended.

>
> (please note we have e.g. a lot of XML parsing libraries in the stdlib,
> and nobody seems in a hurry to deprecate them)

Because no one has brought forward an XML replacement module that
doesn't provide some huge reason to not use SAX, DOM, or ETree (and
there is a reason to have all three).

-Brett