[py-dev] revising exception handling / help appreciated

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:29:05 +0100, holger krekel writes:
>On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 18:30 +0100, Laura Creighton wrote:
>> Something that is germane to this discussion:
>> 
>> Most users (and we tested them, somewhere I have hard evidence for this
>)
>
>I wonder how you could provide real hard evidence for this, but 
>it probably doesn't matter so much ... 

Oh it was fun.  We filmed them constantly, and had access to all their
communications.  This is one nice thing about testing on soldiers rather
than on customers.  The soldiers can be ordered not to leave, and put up
with whatever foolishness you want to do to them.  We did some pretty foolish
things, all in the name of seeing how they would react.

>Actually, with the new scheme they'd would look like e.g.: 
>
>  EPERM: [Operation not Permitted]: chmod('/tmp', 500, 500) 
>
>together with a traceback that shows how it came to this call. 
>This seems to be the best of two worlds: a precise error description
>for a specific call to underlying os-level services and 
>the name ("EPERM") which allows to catch this precise error. 
>This is at least a lot better than what there is now. 

>On a side note, please don't forget the burden of implementing
>code, writing docs and tests for all this. It's not _only_ 
>the usage side that i worry about but also ease, simplicty
>and predictability of the implementation. 

Sounds to me as if you have found another area where people who want
to contribute, but don't want to at the implementation level can.  Now we
need a way to conveniently break out such work so we can see if it
tempts volunteers.

Laura

>
>cheers, 
>
>    holger