I just read the feature article "Command line programs are classes, too!" by Doug Hellmann in the January 2008 issue of Python Magazine about his program CommandLineApp and I've tried it out on one of my old Python programs where I do the opt parsing manually with getopt. The results are beautiful and quick. It's sprinkled with Doug specific magic but I quickly got over that when I saw out easy it was to work with. There are still a few questions of things I didn't manage to work out but that will unfortunately have to wait.