[Freeipa-devel] Proposal: Use argparse for option parsing

[Dmitri Pal]

On 10/12/2012 11:04 AM, Petr Viktorin wrote:
> Hello,
> I read through https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/3060 and
> noticed that the requirements are similar to what an existing library
> offers.
>
> The optparse module we currently use for CLI option parsing is
> deprecated[1]. The replacement is called argparse, which is part of
> the Python 2.7 standard library. Out of the box, it provides several
> features we either lack or had to handle manually, namely:
> * supporting sub-commands [2]
> * producing more informative usage messages [2]
> * handling both optional and positional arguments [3]
> * as well as including a number of other more minor improvements on
> the optparse API. [3]
>
> The package has also been backported to Python 2.6, the only catch
> there is that it's not in the standard library.
>
>
> Not much of our code calls optparse directly, so switching shouldn't
> be a major effort (within the scope of reorganizing the help system).
> In exchange we get better CLI help messages, forward compatibility,
> and reuse of proven code instead of our own solutions.
>
>
> [1] http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html
> [2] http://code.google.com/p/argparse/
> [3] yum info python-argparse (EPEL-6)
>
The ticket is IMO nice to have. Does it provide any value for other main
commands?
If so can you reference other tickets that it would help with.
I am not sure I want the switch for just help.

-- 
Thank you,
Dmitri Pal

Sr. Engineering Manager for IdM portfolio
Red Hat Inc.


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