[Docutils-develop] [docutils:bugs] Re: #441 Move from "optparse" to "argparse".

[Günter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2022-01-12, Adam Turner wrote:
> Sorry for the radio silence!

No need to apologise. Docutils development is slow and there is real life, too.

> I've made some progress in this branch

Looks promising, thank you.

I would not add as many leading underscores, though,
to keep consistency with the existing code base.
Exceptions are new additions that are bound to go/change in near future
or minor auxiliary objects that are only locally used.

Before the move to dict based arguments_spec, give us a pause to
plan/discuss/document what the specs shall look like.

> The work does lead me to ask about how pace of deprecations / removal

That is a tricky question. I like clean code but I got burned several times
after removing obscure parts only to find out that this broke applications
with indirect dependency on Docutils and maintainers not knowing about the
project lest reading our RELEASE-NOTES :(

> Can I remove the "old" config parsing logic? It was deprecated in 2003
> in R1643 ( https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/code/1643/ ).

Not yet, I am afraid. I changed the "may be removed" to "will be removed"
two months ago in [r8880]. Next step would be to add a removal version...

> Equally, when deprecating features that would be obsoleted by my
> changes, would you suggest announcing removal in v0.20.0, v1.0.0, etc?

I don't know whether there will be v0.20 at all. The idea is to reconcile the
reality (Docutils is used as if it were mature) and the version number (<1)
once the API sufficiently defined a deprecation policy is agreed.
Alternatively, 1.0.0 could be pushed off a while and be a clean start
(including removals currently scheduled for 1.2). This would require
re-wording the DeprecationWarnings to say 0.21 or later.

> (I have seen the proposed deprecation policy -- my personal feedback
> would be that it should go along with a versioning policy. 

This discussion deserves a separate thread/ticket.

Thanks, Günter


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** [bugs:#441] Move from "optparse" to "argparse".**

**Status:** open
**Created:** Thu Jan 06, 2022 03:02 PM UTC by Günter Milde
**Last Updated:** Wed Jan 12, 2022 04:16 PM UTC
**Owner:** Günter Milde


The optparse documentation says:
> Deprecated since version 3.2: The optparse module is deprecated and will not be developed further; development will continue with the argparse module.

We are currently suppressing related deprecation warnings in the test suite.
After raising the Python dependency to >=3.7, now may be the right time to make the move.


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