I've been using one of several systems to catch unexpected exceptions and log them (e.g., write to a file, display on web page, email me, etc). But many are built into a particular system, or have an interesting but incomplete set of features. E.g., many web frameworks have exception reporters (and the stdlib includes cgitb),
but I want to handle non-web exceptions in the same way as exceptions
from web requests, and that's not generally easy.
...
I feel like there must be something out there, since every Python programmer has to deal with this sort of thing to some degree...?
I feel that way, too, but haven't found it. I broke my webapp framework out of my ORM late last year, and quickly realized how small the core framework really is (22k, versus 250k for the web bits). Features like the logging handler could be provided as separate modules, rather than built into the Application object, and I've been meaning to get around to that. If we could put our many heads together, I think this would be doable for the stdlib.
I'm not optimistic about a good exception handler in the standard library; development slows down a lot at that point, and it's not a reasonable candidate until it is designed and used (in part because of that slowdown -- if it's not mature, it is a diservice to the project to calcify the interface with such strong backward compatibility requirements). But anyway, hopefully multiple people/frameworks/projects could use such a library, done well, as a start.
Here are the pieces of the framework, by the way, which might also benefit from some standardization (I was thinking about them all at once):
1. Thread-safe application state 2. Logging (+ exception handling) 3. Configuration data (reading from various sources) 4. Registry of Workers for getting things done on a schedule, possibly recurring 5. Registry of startup/shutdown functions 6. Registry of active user interfaces
I think the first three are all good candidates for a standard. If we had a standard, thread-safe Application object, the rest could be registerable plugins for that. You'd basically register callbacks for app.startup and .shutdown methods to iterate over.
Hmm... I'm confused by these bits. Are you talking about libraries for other parts of a web framework, besides exception handling? If so, you might want to look into WSGI and then discuss these things on the web-sig list (WSGI as a starting point; it doesn't specifically relate to many of these ideas, but provides a context in which to develop them). Some of these have been discussed there, like logging, configuration, and perhaps aspects of the registration you are thinking about.
-- Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
