[RFC] use optparse for option handling

[Martin Pool]

On 12 Jul 2006, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> Well, I think the details of command-option parsing is a problem space
> not really worthy of our attention.  Optparse handles '-' properly, so
> it's better than we were a week ago, and there may be other subtleties
> we're missing, too.
> 
> There may also be network effects, e.g. for option completion.

Yes.  I just hadn't worked out if there was a good way to e.g. do
negative options, or options which accumulate a value, etc.  If there is
and the other issues about cost as settled then it's good with me.

> > Also, we want --no-foo to set the inverse of --foo.
> 
> That's pretty easily done.  Should we just generate those options
> automatically?  Should they be hidden options?

I would say we want something like

  Option('remember', negatable=True)

it's probably good to show both in the help.

> > Not reliaably.  The typical thing would be to make it an instance of
> > some non-string class -- just an instance of object() would do.  (I
> > thought that symbol_versioning did this, but apparently not.)
> 
> NULL_REVISION should probably do that too.  Though it looks like John's
> solution of constructing the string from two pieces is used in optparse
> itself.

Relying on ("a" + "b") to not intern to "ab"?  It seems possible some
other or future Python implementation might eval it at compile time and
then do the wrong thing...  maybe this is paranoid.

-- 
Martin