• Kirill Smelkov's avatar
    golang: Teach defer to chain exceptions (PEP 3134) even on Python2 · bb9a94c3
    Kirill Smelkov authored
    Python3 chains exceptions, so that e.g. if exc1 is raised and, while it
    was not handled, another exc2 is raised, exc2 will be linked to exc1 via
    exc2.__context__ attribute and exc1 will be included into exc2 traceback
    printout. However many projects still use Python2 and there is no
    similar chaining functionality there. This way exc1 is completely lost.
    
    Since defer code is in our hands, we can teach it to implement exception
    chaining even on Python2 by carefully analyzing what happens in
    _GoFrame.__exit__().
    
    Implementing chaining itself is relatively easy, but is only part of the
    story. Even if an exception is chained with its cause, but exception
    dump does not show the cause, the chaining will be practically useless.
    With this in mind this patches settles not only on implementing chaining
    itself, but on also giving a promise that chained cause exceptions will
    be included into traceback dumps as well.
    
    To realize this promise we adjust all exception dumping funcitons in
    traceback module and carefully install adjusted
    traceback.print_exception() into sys.excepthook. This amends python
    interactive sessions and programs run by python interpreter to include
    causes in exception dumps. "Careful" here means that we don't change
    sys.excepthook if on golang module load we see that sys.excepthook was already
    changed by some other module - e.g. due to IPython session running
    because IPython installs its own sys.excepthook. In such cases we don't
    install our sys.excepthook, but we also provide integration patches that
    add exception chaining support for traceback dump functionality in
    popular third-party software. The patches (currently for IPython and
    Pytest) are activated automatically, but only when/if corresponding
    software is imported and actually used. This should give practically
    good implementation of the promise - a user can now rely on seeing
    exception cause in traceback dump whatever way python programs are run.
    
    The implementation takes https://pypi.org/project/pep3134/ experience
    into account [1]. peak.utils.imports [2,3] is used to be notified when/if
    third-party module is imported.
    
    [1] https://github.com/9seconds/pep3134/
    [2] https://pypi.org/project/Importing/
    [3] http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/Importing
    
    This patch originally started as hacky workaround in wendelin.core
    because in wcfs tests I was frequently hitting situations, where
    exception raised by an assert was hidden by another exception raised in
    further generic teardown check. For example wcfs tests check that wcfs
    is unmounted after every test run [4] and if that fails it was hiding
    problems raised by an assert. As the result I was constantly guessing
    and adding code like [5] to find what was actually breaking. At some
    point I added hacky workaround for defer to print cause exception not to
    loose it [6]. [7] has more context and background discussion on this topic.
    
    [4] https://lab.nexedi.com/kirr/wendelin.core/blob/49e73a6d/wcfs/wcfs_test.py#L70
    [5] https://lab.nexedi.com/kirr/wendelin.core/blob/49e73a6d/wcfs/wcfs_test.py#L853-857
    [6] kirr/wendelin.core@c00d94c7
    [7] nexedi/zodbtools!13 (comment 81553)
    
    After this patch, on Python2
    
        defer(cleanup1)
        defer(cleanup2)
        defer(cleanup3)
        ...
    
    is no longer just a syntatic sugar for
    
        try:
            try:
                try:
                    ...
                finally:
                    cleanup3()
            finally:
                cleanup2()
        finally:
            cleanup1()
    bb9a94c3
README.rst 11.4 KB