Re: [PATCH 1/1] bbclass: bb.fatal() clean up

[Mike Looijmans <mike.looijmans@topic.nl>]

On 05/08/2013 11:06 AM, Robert Yang wrote:
> The bb.fatal() is defined as:
>
> def fatal(*args):
>      logger.critical(''.join(args))
>      sys.exit(1)
>
> So anything after bb.fatal() in the same code block doesn't have any
> effect, e.g.:
>
>      bb.fatal("%s_%s: %s" % (var, pkg, e))
>      raise e
>
> The "raise e" should be removed.

Just some random thoughts that occurred to me when I read this:

The "terminate" effect would be obvious if "fatal" were an exception to 
be raised instead of a function to call which does not really return. If 
I'm not mistaken, "sys.exit(1)" actually just raises a SystemExit exception.

So instead of:

bb.fatal("something went wrong")

the syntax would become:

raise bb.Fatal("something went wrong")


Having typed this, the next random thought I got was that a thing like

catch Exception, e:
    bb.fatal("Error: ", e)

isn't really adding anything useful, it just "translates" the exception, 
logs its message, and then throws an obscure system exit exception 
instead of the much more useful inner exception.