Re: Dabo in 30 seconds?

Terry Reedy wrote:
"Ed Leafe" <ed@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:200508010830.27322.ed@xxxxxxxxxxxx 

I'm serious here: I want to know what people consider acceptable for a
software package that relies on other packages.

To me, acceptability depends on the audience. Do you want to limit Dabo to professional developers comfortable with sometimes cryptic traceback messages or do you want to include people using Python as part of other activities?

My concern with putting another layer on top of Python's excellent traceback mechanism is that we could screw up and hide important exceptions, or otherwise make it harder for the seasoned Pythonista to get to the source of the issue. Nothing beats those tracebacks, ugly though they may seem to a newbie... perhaps we need both methods, and to default to the "nice" error handler.

Your idea of checking for common missing pieces or misconfigurations on startup is a great idea though. Also, we do already provide for information and error logs, which get directed to stdout and stderr by default. Perhaps we just need to give slightly higher-level control of them, so that an individual developer can "set it and forget it" for each individual app. There are other settings as well, such as event logging, that are useful during testing - we should consolidate all these options into a setup screen of some sort. All in good time!

--
Paul McNett
http://paulmcnett.com

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