[Python-Dev] Catch SIGINT at Python startup

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 8, 2010, at 4:06 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> I am trying to remember why I made site.py failures non-fatal in the
> first place. I don't have any specific recollection but it must've
> been either from before the separation between site.py (part of the
> stdlib) and sitecustomize.py (site-specific) or out of a worry that if
> some external cause broke site.py (which does a lot of I/O) it would
> be a fatal breakdown of all Python execution.
>
> The thing that occurs to me is that one might want to write an
> administrative tool in Python to manipulate site.py, or even just some data
> that something in site.py would load.

This would be a more likely theory if we didn't have sitecustomize.py
to be manipulated.

> If exceptions from site.py were
> fatal, then bugs in such a tool would be completely unrecoverable; in trying
> to run it to un-do the buggy operation, it would crash immediately.
> On the other hand, such a tool should *really* be invoked with the -S option
> anyway, so... maybe not that pressing of a concern.

Right. I'm leaning towards the theory that treating site.py failures
as non-fatal is older than the separation between site.py and
sitecustomize.py.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)