[stdlib-sig] Maintenance of optparse

[Michael Foord]

Armin Ronacher wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> What started as a joke yesterday in the Bug Tracker and on Twitter now
> evolved into a serious consideration.  In case the only reason for
> optparse to go away is that it does not have a maintainer I would take
> over that task.
>
> In fact I would also implement missing features based on real-world
> needs.  That would most likely mean that some of the changes in argparse
> would end up in optparse as well.  Furthermore I would release a
> Python-independent version on PyPI for compatibility with older Python
> versions.
>
> I would take over this task if the following criteria are met:
>
> - argparse would not enter the standard library
>   

That can't be a pre-requisite as we can't tell if you will succeed until 
you actually look at the problem and see how possible it is. I would do 
a feasibility check.

For me the important features of argparse are:

* handling positional arguments including required positional arguments
* required options (which it looks like can be added easily - the above 
is less easy though)
* subcommands
> - I'm allowed to modernize optparse after a discussion with python-dev
>   
That would be true anyway, unless we had already decided to deprecate.

>   in a backwards compatible way.
> - I'm allowed to refactor the code
>   

Ditto.

> - make the i18n support of the module more pluggable which would allow
>   specifying a custom translations instance instead of using the global
>   gettext function.
>
>   
That sounds good to me. I don't know how 'mandatory' others feel the use 
of gettext is in il8n support in the standard library.

Michael

> Regards,
> Armin
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