Tobias Herp <tobias.h...@gmx.de> writes: > Steven Bethard schrieb: > > On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > >> Steven Bethard <steven.bethard <at> gmail.com> writes: > >>> Note that even though I agree with you that "-v/--version" is > >>> probably not the best choice, in the poll[2] 11% of people still > >>> wanted this. > >> > >> This strikes me as a small minority. > > > > Agreed, but it's also the current behavior, ... > > The current /broken, non-standard/ behaviour.
I think that is overstating your case. Steven is pointing out the fact that “default to ‘-v’ and ‘--version’” is the current behaviour for argparse. It's also a fact that argparse, as a third-party library, has an existing user base, and changing this behaviour incompatibly is not something to do lightly. To call this behaviour “broken” is a stretch too far, IMO. It does break compatibility with optparse, but it's not *inherently* broken as the above would imply. Nor is there really a standard for this behaviour to be measured “non-standard”. At best, there is a strong convention among Unix command-line programs of ‘--version’ for a version action and ‘-v’ for enabling verbose output. But that convention is not normative, so it's too much to call it a standard IMO. > I have collected lots of examples of widely used programs and their > options. The only example of '-v', '--verbose' is argparse. I'm not sure what programs you're talking about (argparse is a library, not a program that can be run by itself), but in a brief search of my system I've found several programs that use ‘-v’ for a version action, including among others: * Info-ZIP's ‘zip’ and ‘unzip’ * GNU ‘fdisk’ * Vim's ‘xxd’ * W3C's ‘tidy’ These are certainly widely deployed, although they may not be widely familiar. I do agree that such programs are a small minority, but it's overstating your case to call them “non-standard”, since there's no standard for this, or “broken”, since they demonstrably work fine. Rather, they buck what is certainly a firm convention to avoid ‘-v’ for a version option. I'm certainly in favour of preserving that convention by avoiding use of ‘-v’ for version. I would rather, though, that the discussion remain aware of facts and not descend into hyperbole. -- \ “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear | `\ than I who receive it.” —Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake by | _o__) the Catholic church for the heresy of heliocentrism, 1600-02-16 | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
