[Python-Dev] urllib exception compatibility (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Sep 28 07:50:17 CEST 2007

Gregory P. Smith wrote:

Is IOError is the right name to use? OSError is raised for things that are not IO such as subprocess, dlopen, system.

The trouble with either of these is that the class of errors we're talking about don't necessarily come directly from the OS or I/O library.

Often I raise my own EnvironmentError instances for things which don't have any associated OS error code but are nonetheless environment-related, such as an error in a file format.

I don't reuse IOError or OSError because I feel as though I ought to supply an errno with these, but there isn't any.

I suppose we could pick one of these and make it official that it's okay to instantiate it without an errno. But it's hard to decide which one, because they both sound too narrow in scope.

I don't like EMError either, btw. Maybe EnvError? Although that sounds like it has something to do with the unix environment variables.

-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiem! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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