Andy Buckley <a...@insectnation.org> added the comment: Are these really bugs? The first message just reports the error the other way around from how you view it: you are thinking of "-TO" as a two-character "short option", optparse thinks of it as a two-character long option which is missing a dash. I would side with optparse's definition, since the point of short options is that they can be combined under a single dash --- a multi-character option can't do that, and so can't be "short" by definition.
In both this and the "-h" issue, optparse is reasonably enforcing a UI convention as well as providing parsing facilities. That uniformity of UI behaviour is a design goal is made explicit in the documentation. Using optparse means that users can rely on "-h" to give them help documentation, which IMO is a very useful convention to respect. And the splitting of long and short options by whether they are single character (and hence can be combined) or multi-character (hence uncombinable, but good for less-used options without eating up the alphabetic option namespace) is another nice convention which optparse enforces. -1 from me: I think the existing behaviours are good, largely *because* they aren't flexible. ---------- nosy: +andybuckley _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue4278> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
