Not sure why this was marked as fixed. argparse 1.2.1 still has this issue.
The issue that was fixed was that if a default is supplied, it is copied so
that multiple calls to parse_args work correctly.
I assume you're asking for the default for the "append" action to be an
empty list? If so, please open a new issue for that, at the argparse bug
tracker, which is the Python bug tracker: http://bugs.python.org/ Bugs
reported to the Google Code tracker are likely to be lost.