Dabo in 30 seconds?

[Paul McNett]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> "Ed Leafe" <ed at leafe.com> wrote in message 
> news:200508010830.27322.ed at leafe.com...

>>I'm serious here: I want to know what people consider acceptable for a
>>software package that relies on other packages.

> To me, acceptability depends on the audience.  Do you want to limit Dabo to 
> professional developers comfortable with sometimes cryptic traceback 
> messages or do you want to include people using Python as part of other 
> activities?

My concern with putting another layer on top of Python's excellent 
traceback mechanism is that we could screw up and hide important 
exceptions, or otherwise make it harder for the seasoned Pythonista to 
get to the source of the issue. Nothing beats those tracebacks, ugly 
though they may seem to a newbie... perhaps we need both methods, and to 
default to the "nice" error handler.

Your idea of checking for common missing pieces or misconfigurations on 
startup is a great idea though. Also, we do already provide for 
information and error logs, which get directed to stdout and stderr by 
default. Perhaps we just need to give slightly higher-level control of 
them, so that an individual developer can "set it and forget it" for 
each individual app. There are other settings as well, such as event 
logging, that are useful during testing - we should consolidate all 
these options into a setup screen of some sort. All in good time!

-- 
Paul McNett
http://paulmcnett.com