feature request #1055954: respect newlines in description

Greg wishes discussion about my feature request. You can see my request as 
item #1055954.

In short, I would like to control the linefeeds in the description field. 
I do not like the way everything in the description is jammed into a 
single paragraph.

For example, here's the usage output of a recent sample app of mine.
---
F:\python>beepclient.py
usage: beepclient.py server:port testcase

beepclient.py is a prototype beep client written in python. The client
provides multiple test cases:
1 - send corrupted packet
2 - send packet without CRLF
3 - send ok packet
4 - no CRLF after END
5 - send 2 ok packets
6 - send 2 packets, garbage between
7 - send 2 auth packets, 1 data

Author: Tomi Mickelsson. Version 0.1, Feb 2, 2005

options:
   --version   show program's version number and exit
   -h, --help  show this help message and exit
   -v          verbose
   -fFILENAME  filename to merge
   -pPORT      Listen port
---

To achieve this formatting, I have the following kludge in my code:
---
import new

....code omitted

# use my own description formatter method
parser.format_description = new.instancemethod(lambda self,x : 
self.description, parser, parser.__class__)

...now use the parser
---

In the solution I replace a method in the parser with my own method that 
just returns the description as it is without any formatting.

While this works ok for my purposes, it's kludgery and looks bad. I'd like 
to get rid of the new.instancemethod; it scares the developers looking at 
the code and leaves a bad impression of python.

With this solution, I do loose all formatting features of textwrap. Could 
we draft a solution where textwrap is used but the user can insert hard 
line breaks in the description text?

Tomi Mickelsson, [email protected]


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