Listing all python modules robustly

[Brian]

I've used the C api to write a method that can call any python module
function. I would like to extend the interface to allow dynamically listing
all python modules, and for a given module all functions, and for a given
function all argument types and the return types if possible.
Starting with the modules, I came up with this bit of code:

from pkgutil import walk_packages;

modules=[]

modules = [modules.append(item[1]) for item in walk_packages()]


I then took this to my various systems for testing. It works fine on OSX and
one of my Ubuntu boxes, but two of the Ubuntu boxes fail, each with a
different error message.  The failure is due to python importing every
single module and some of the modules failing. One example is the
UniConverter package - towards the end of __init__.py it calls sys.exit(0)
which kills the interpreter completely.

I've spent a ton of time trying to rewrite walk_packages to be robust to
failure, but so far without luck. Any advice is appreciated.

/Brian
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