Socket exceptions aren't in the standard exception hierarchy

[Steve Holden]

John Nagle wrote:
> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>> On Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:20:25 -0700, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com>
>> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:
>>
>>
>>> 2. File "D:\Python24\lib\socket.py", line 295, in read
>>> data = self._sock.recv(recv_size)
>>> error: (10054, 'Connection reset by peer')
>>>
>> 	That looks like M$ Windows version of UNIX/Linux error number 54
>> (pretty much all Windows socket errors are UNIX number+10000)
>>
>> 	Errors coming from Windows may not be mapped to specific Python
>> exceptions, but rather to some general error conditions. {hypothesis} As
>> such, the Windows errors may not match what UNIX/Linux report.
> 
>      Actually, that's not what's happening. The socket module is
> explicitly raising "socket.error" in C code.  It's not an OSError or
> a WindowsError, although the text makes it look like one.
> 
>      The problem is not that socket errors aren't entirely portable.
> It's that they're not even in the Python exception hierarchy.
> See "http://docs.python.org/lib/module-exceptions.html".
> They have their own hierarchy, which starts at "socket.error".
> All built-in exceptions were supposed to be converted to the
> standard exception hierarchy back before Python 2.0, but these
> weren't.
> 
>      Either they should be under IOError, or there should be
> "NetworkError" under EnvironmentError, and they should be under
> that.  "NetworkError", alongside IOError in the hierarchy,
> would be useful.  All the things that go wrong in networking
> belong under there.  Socket-level errors, SSL/TLS-level errors,
> and HTTP/FTP/etc. level errors all belong under NetworkError.
> 
>      This has to be fixed before PEP 352, when the exception
> hierarchy is enforced, or the socket exceptions won't even work
> right.
> 
John:

Where did you get this information? If true it would certainly need to 
be logged as a bug, but under Windows on 2,4 I see

  >>> issubclass(socket.gaierror, Exception)
True
  >>>

and the same under Cygwin 2.5. I am presuming most other users will see 
the same thing.

regards
  Steve
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