[Python-ideas] Logical tracebacks

[Nathan Goldbaum]

This is a really great idea. I’d also point to the awful hacks that jinja2
needs to go through to elide jinia2 frames from user tracebacks as an
indicator that this is a desired feature.

https://github.com/pallets/jinja/blob/master/jinja2/debug.py

On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 2:08 PM Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I apologize because I'm only going to throw a very vague idea and I
> don't currently have time or motivation to explore it myself.  But I
> think it may prove interesting for other people and perhaps spur some
> concrete actionable proposal.
>
> With the growing complexity of Python software stacks, the length of
> tracebacks is continuously growing and is frequently making debugging
> errors and issues more tedious than it should be.  This is a
> language-agnostic problem.  Java software is often mocked for its
> ridiculously long tracebacks, but Python might come close in the future.
>
> Especially since Python is often the a language of choice for non
> computer science professionals, including but not only as a teaching
> language, this would be a problem worth solving.  We already recognized
> the issue some years ago, and even implemented a focussed fix for one
> specific context: the elision of importlib frames when an import error
> occurs:
> https://bugs.python.org/issue15110
>
> However, there are many contexts where implementation details would
> benefit from being hidden from tracebacks (the classical example being
> the internals of framework or middleware code, such as Django, Dask,
> etc.).  We would therefore have to define some kind of protocol by
> which tracebacks can be enumerated, not only as frames, but as logical
> execution blocks, comprised of one or several frames each, whose
> boundaries would reflect the boundaries of the various logical
> execution layers (again: framework, middleware...) involved in the
> frame stack.  We would probably also need some flag(s) to disable the
> feature in cases where the full stack frame is wanted (I imagine
> elaborate UIs could also allow switching back and forth from both
> representations).
>
> This would need a lot more thinking, and perhaps exploring what kind of
> hacks already exist in the wild to achieve similar functionality.
> Again, I'm just throwing this around for others to play with.
>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>
>
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