[Python-ideas] Logical tracebacks

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/15/2019 4:07 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I apologize because I'm only going to throw a very vague idea and I
> don't currently have time or motivation to explore it myself.  But I
> think it may prove interesting for other people and perhaps spur some
> concrete actionable proposal.
> 
> With the growing complexity of Python software stacks, the length of
> tracebacks is continuously growing and is frequently making debugging
> errors and issues more tedious than it should be.  This is a
> language-agnostic problem.  Java software is often mocked for its
> ridiculously long tracebacks, but Python might come close in the future.
> 
> Especially since Python is often the a language of choice for non
> computer science professionals, including but not only as a teaching
> language, this would be a problem worth solving.  We already recognized
> the issue some years ago, and even implemented a focussed fix for one
> specific context: the elision of importlib frames when an import error
> occurs:
> https://bugs.python.org/issue15110
> 
> However, there are many contexts where implementation details would
> benefit from being hidden from tracebacks (the classical example being
> the internals of framework or middleware code, such as Django, Dask,
> etc.).  We would therefore have to define some kind of protocol by
> which tracebacks can be enumerated, not only as frames, but as logical
> execution blocks, comprised of one or several frames each, whose
> boundaries would reflect the boundaries of the various logical
> execution layers (again: framework, middleware...) involved in the
> frame stack.  We would probably also need some flag(s) to disable the
> feature in cases where the full stack frame is wanted (I imagine
> elaborate UIs could also allow switching back and forth from both
> representations).
> 
> This would need a lot more thinking, and perhaps exploring what kind of
> hacks already exist in the wild to achieve similar functionality.

IDLE has some hackish code to eliminate the extra stuff it adds to raw 
tracebacks.  An IDLE startup flag to not do that might occasionally be 
useful for IDLE development.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy