[Python-Dev] Revert #12085 fix for del attribute error message (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Sep 22 10:19:36 CEST 2013

On Sat, 21 Sep 2013 19:55:05 -0400 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

> In the general case it represents a bug in > the code that should be fixed. Most such errors arise from the vagaries > of module finalization (such as your issue 19021), Lets call that a buglet ;-). Not really harmful, but annoying.

It's not a buglet. A buggy del method is as much a bug as any other buggy method. del issues can lead to resources not being properly finalized and released to the system.

Accepting that even such buglets 'should' be fixed in the stdllib, so that the message does not appear, is there any reason not to make it a RuntimeWarning so that users who care about clean output can filter it out while waiting for us to fix it?

Yes, the reason is that these are real exceptions, not warnings. The reason the exceptions are not propagated is that they can occur at any point (finalization is pretty much asynchronous, it can occur from unrelated places), so propagating them to whatever code happens to execute at the time would be a huge instability factor.

Making them warnings means they could be silenced depending on the current warning settings.

Regards

Antoine.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list