Implement and/or document flags (boolean option) with automatic sub-flags about defopt HOT 6 CLOSED

I think I initially had reasons for not doing this but they all seem a bit weak now. I like the idea of doing this automatically.

I personally find negations using + to be counter-intuitive, but I'm aware that they're used in a number of places, so I'm not against giving people the option to use them if we can find a simple way of doing it. I'll keep this in mind when looking at #2.

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an alternative would be negations using the uppercase short opt.

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What's the point of the inverted flags? I know they're used in some places, but they just seem confusing to me. Here's an actual example from pip install -h:

  --compile                   Compile py files to pyc
  --no-compile                Do not compile py files to pyc

Obviously one of these must be the default, but I have no way of telling. Since one of them is implied by not specifying it, why do we need the flag at all?

Here's another flag for the same command:

--no-clean                  Don't clean up build directories.

Since there is no corresponding --clean flag, I know that the default behavior must be to clean up build directories.

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with both, the default can be changed anytime (--flag means True, --no-flag means False)

and as the later option trumps, you can override stuff in aliases, …

alias ls='ls -l'

$ ls
drwxr-xr-x 1 phil users  314  6. Mär 12:12 bin/
$ ls -x
bin/

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I've had a shot at an implementation of this to use as a discussion point. Take a look at 09bdead.

Some points to discuss:

• This only applies to optional arguments; a positional boolean argument is still specified as something accepted by _parse_bool.
• The help message only shows documentation for the --name flag; the --no-name flag is blank but comes immediately after the other flag so should be clear enough.
• This allows for you to have None or some other value as the default, so neither --name nor --no-name are necessarily implied to match the default behavior (if you really want to do that).

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This has been implemented and will be in 2.0. Discussion on how to handle short flags can continue in #2 if necessary.

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