KeyboardInterrupt eats my error and then won't be caught

Philip Semanchuk philip at semanchuk.com
Sun Jun 21 10:49:42 EDT 2009


On Jun 20, 2009, at 10:21 PM, greg wrote:

> Philip Semanchuk wrote:
>
>> Best of all, PyErr_CheckSignals() doesn't interfere with a Python-  
>> level signal handler if one is set.
>
> Ah, I hadn't realised that you were doing this in C
> code, and I was trying to think of a Python-level
> solution.
>
> For C code, the solution you give sounds like a
> good one.
>
> My only misgiving is that the user might expect to
> get a KeyboardInterrupt in response to Ctrl-C, so
> it might be better to just let it propagate instead
> of turning it into a different exception.

I completely agree. The simple solution (for me) is to handle all  
return codes of EINTR the same way which is to raise posix_ipc.Error  
with the message "The wait was interrupted by a signal". But that  
loses information. KeyboardInterrupt is very specific while  
posix_ipc.Error is generic and even parsing the message doesn't tell  
much more.

When my C code sees EINTR, I will probably raise KeyboardError when I  
see that and add a specific posix_ipc.SignalError to raise in other  
EINTR circumstances.


Thanks,
Philip



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