[Python-Dev] Request for review (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Thu Apr 13 03:26:37 CEST 2006

[Georg Brandl]

Hm. This broke a few doctests. I can fix them, but I wonder if doctest should accept a bare exception name if the exception is defined in the current module.

No.

Or should it ignore the module name altogether?

No. doctest strives to be magic-free WYSIWYG. If someone intends the module name to be optional in a doctest, they should explicitly use doctest's ELLIPSIS option.

(Background:

In normal exception tracebacks, non-builtin exceptions are printed with their module name prepended: Traceback: [...] decimal.InvalidOperation: ... When formatted by traceback.formatexceptiononly, the module name was omitted, which the patch mentioned above corrected. Since doctest relies on that behavior, three stdlib doctests broke.)

Changes to visible behavior should not be introduced in bugfix releases, unless that happens as an unavoidable consequence of repairing a critical bug, so this should be yanked from 2.4. I agree the traceback formatting inconsistency was a bug, but it was hardly critical (for example, nobody noticed it for 15 years <0.5 wink>).

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list