Thanks! The main problem is that there is no way to pass command-line arguments to the script being profiled. This is why I used optparse at the time; the allow_interspersed_args is a cheap and cheerful (albeit not entirely proper) way to allow this. There are ways to do this with argparse, with some effort.

Ah true, you are right, I will take a look of this issue, if I manage to do it I will submit a new pull request.
You can remove this one :P

Regards

Thanks! The less-than-ideal solution is just to add an extra nargs='*' script_args argument, but this will force users to put a -- between the script and any --options meant for the script to prevent the kernprof parser from treating them as kernprof options.

Personally, I am inclined to just leave it as-is for now. While deprecated, optparse is not going to be removed from the standard library, as far as I've followed the discussion. It's just not the state-of-the-art recommendation for new projects, and new features probably won't be added to it. click has similar problems with argparse and has also chosen to stick with optparse.

That said, if you can find another reason to use argparse, something that it handles better than optparse without introducing more problems, be my guest.