Copying my response here as I accidentally sent my original response only to Hans directly:
I agree with you, but boost_check_library.py has to work on all the machines which run the Boost Test matrix,
Does it? Isn't that just a waste of time? IIRC, the script doesn't run unit tests or anything. It just checks for the presence and content of various files and directories. I don't know, why this has to run on every test machine.
I am mainly asking because I would like to replace optparse with argparse, which first appeared in Python2.7.
My opinion: Go ahead. If this causes trouble on a test machine, that is imho a reason to either fix the test machine or to not run the script on that machine (just as unit-tests for c++14 libs are not/should not be run on machines without a c++14 compiler). It should not hold back development. But I guess Rene or maybe Michael are the ones who could give a more authoritative answer on that.
Von: "Paul A Bristow via Boost" <boost@lists.boost.org>
[..]
It's even easier than I thought - I idly open a dosbox and typed Python and lo this came up.
What's a dosbox? I guess you didn't mean https://www.dosbox.com/ ? ;) Sorry, couldn't resist - I.e. I hope, no one is developing boost on a Windows 98/ME system anymore. But I don't have any preference on how those checks are done. Python tends to be suited way better for text processing than c++, but if the code is already there, then I agree - hwy reinvent the wheel. Anyway, if the problems don't get fixed, it doesn't matter what tool is used to detect them. Best Mike