Appending traceback from exception in child thread

[Edd]

Hi folks,

I have a some threadpool code that works like this :

    tp = ThreadPool(number_of_threads)
    futures = [tp.future(t) for t in tasks] # each task is callable
    for f in futures:
        print f.value() # <-- may propagate an exception

The idea being that a Future object represents a value that may or may
not have been computed yet and the .value() method will block until
that value is ready.

As the comment on the last line indicates, looking at the .value() of
a Future may give the return value of the associated task, or it may
also propagate an exception that was raised in a child thread.

Inside the implementation I store caught exceptions with code that
looks something like:

    try:
        self.return_value = self.task()
    except:
        self.exception = sys.exc_info()[1]

The problem I have is that when an exception is propagated in to the
parent thread by re-raising it, the part of the traceback from the
child thread is lost. So if the program dies due to such an exception,
I can't see what caused it by examining the printed traceback.

To solve this problem, I could of course grab the traceback in the
child thread and create some kind of custom exception that stashes the
trace inside. This could then be caught on the fringes of my code in
order to combine the tracebacks of parent and child together before
printing it. But I was wondering if there might be a nicer way that
keeps the original exception object. Perhaps something akin to gluing
the tracebacks together at the point where the exception is re-raised?

Kind regards,

Edd