[Python-modules-team] Bug#585334: python-sympy: Python string exceptions no more allowed in Python 2.6

[Ondrej Certik]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Sandro Tosi <morph at ravel.debian.org> wrote:
> Package: python-sympy
> Version: 0.6.7-1.1
> Severity: minor
> User: debian-python at lists.debian.org
> Usertags: python2.6
>
> Hello,
> One of the changes brought by Python 2.6 is the removal of string
> exceptions, so they won't work in Python 2.6 (just a side note: they
> were also buggy before, since they were not guaranteed to work
> reliable even in <2.6); as an example:
>
> $ python2.5 -c "raise 'eggs'"
> -c:1: DeprecationWarning: raising a string exception is deprecated
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
> eggs
>
> $ python2.6 -c "raise 'eggs'"
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: exceptions must be old-style classes or derived from BaseException, not str
>
> Since 2.6 is the planned default version for the upcoming new Debian
> stable release, there are chances your package may be affected by this
> change.
>
> We are not sure your package is impacted, since the exception raise
> can be in a dead or very rare branch of the code, and so simply never
> being executed. We would like to leverage your package maintainer
> status and the relationship with upstream authors to inspect more
> deeply the issue and act accordingly (that includes: making this bug
> release critical, closing it as irrelevant, tagging it 'wontfix', or
> whatever is appropriate).
>
> Jakub Wilk made the discovery of the problem and kindly prepared a
> list [1] of all identified packages (downloaded on 2010-06-09) along
> with files & lines that triggered the pattern search.
>
> [1] http://people.debian.org/~morph/strexp/string-exceptions.lintian
>
> This mass-bug filing was announced at 2010-06-06 on [2] (see the
> thread and the references there).
>
> [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00097.html
>
> We do not consider the whole situation a stopper for the Python
> transition to 2.6, except (of course) for those single bugs where
> severity will be increased.

Thanks for reporting it. I just fixed the package upstream and all
should be ok in the next release of SymPy. The bug would only occur on
the Mac, which means it doesn't affect Debian anyway.

Ondrej