This is extremely important for configuration priority. Program defaults (generally) should be the lowest priority level. Superseded by configuration files. Superseded by command-line arguments. Finally replaced by configuration changes during runtime. Notably each is (in theory) specified in a more specific context as well as more recently.

It seems more like this is a missing feature rather than an issue with mutually exclusive, if the desire is that `argparse` handles this in an elegant, internal way.

So, yes, `argparse` has a limitation on argument groups, but `add_mutually_exclusive_group` is not the issue.

--foo-timeout=5 --bar-timeout=10

or with

--no-timeouts

which disables the timeouts for both too and bar.

I don't know the author's entire usecase, but it seems odd that you would specifically NOT want the user to only disable one timeout, but keep all the others active.

Unless there is a real reason for this, the more logical design for me would be to treat --foo-timeout=0 or something as the setting to disable timeout foo.

Not sure if argparse supports aliases, but if it does, --no-timeouts could then be defined as an alias for "--foo-timeout=0 --bar-timeout=0 --baz-timeout=0" etc etc.