[Twisted-Python] Clarification on returning exceptions via Perspective Broker

[Matt Bennett]

Thank you for the explanation Glyph. Having spent some time
understanding the mechanics of the jellying process, I can see why
things are implemented as they are.

In my path to understanding I came across pb.CopyableFailure, which is
where the state to be passed through PB is extracted from an
Exception. For future reference, I believe patching CopyableFailure to
allow certain parts of the exception to persist would be the quickest,
dirtiest workaround. But for the good reasons outlined I'm not going
to ;-)

Thanks again for the prompt feedback.

Matt.



On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz<glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Matt Bennett <matt at bennett.name> wrote:
>>
>> My exceptions subclass pb.Error, which means tracebacks are suppressed
>> on the server and errbacks triggered on the client, exactly as I'd
>> hoped. What I'm confused about though, is why the
>> serialization/deserialization process reduces my nice structured
>> exception into a mere string. Isn't PB's raison d'être to allow you to
>> send fully formed Python classes over the wire?
>
> It's been a while since I worked with this, but I believe the rationale goes
> something like this:
>
> the most common type of error in PB is a serialization or deserialization
> error.  You sent too much, you didn't send enough, your jellier doesn't
> quite match your unjellier, there's a version skew problem.
>
> If exceptions contained structured data, there's a risk that that data will
> also have a serialization error; or, worse yet, attempt to include the
> problematic data which caused the error in the first place.  So it's
> generally not a good idea to work around this, because you can easily cause
> a mutually recursive loop where reporting the error causes another error
> that needs to be reported.
>
> That said, based on memory and a brief read-through of the code, PB does
> support returning structured exceptions; you can't just return a normal
> Exception subclass, you need to register it as serializable the same way you
> would any other object, and it needs to subclass Jellyable (for example by
> subclassing Copyable).
>
> (I could be wrong, but I believe that is the intent.)
>
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