optparse vs argparse

[Jorge-C]

I've read some old discussions where an argparse backend is
mentioned, but I wonder why command line parsing is eventually
performed by optparse. It's deprecated in Python 2.7 (pyqi's only
supported version in master) and in Python 3.2 onwards.

The recommended replacement is argparse. PEP389, from 2009,
has information on why optparse was deprecated and argparse
introduced, and its advantages have been documented
elsewhere. For example, it doesn't need any of the hairy
stuff in core/interfaces/optparse/init.py:PyqiOption.

There's no expected time to have it removed from the
stdlib. Nonetheless, apart from the better features, error
messages, cleaner code... this is too new and shiny to be using
deprecated modules!

[antgonza]

+1

[jairideout]

👍 this definitely needs to happen, especially before we start converting QIIME to use pyqi config files.

We have a milestone for porting to argparse (which doesn't have any issues assigned to it yet). Adding this issue to the milestone.

[ElDeveloper]

... this is too new and shiny to be using deprecated modules!

👍

[wasade]

👍