While programming some bigger projects, and not some home-brew script, I used to wonder what to do with exceptions coming from lower level and library modules. The ‘home script’ approach to exceptions is “let it rise” – usually because it indicates an error anyway, and the script needs to shut-down. If there is any cleanup to be done, it will happen in the __del__ functions and finally clause as required.
After getting some experience with handling problems and writing applications that continue to work despite exceptions, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best practice approach is that each of the project’s module must raise its own type of exception. That way, in higher level modules that catch the exception you can set a concrete policy about ‘what to do’.
An example: I have some low level module named “worker”. Let’s say this module’s job is to copy files around efficiently. The higher level module, “manager” decides on ‘policy’ about what to do with files (copy them, delete them, etc…). Now, the “worker” module raised an exception. If this exception is an IndexError, the higher level module can’t really decide – was this because of a programming error, or an OS error? Even if “worker” did define an interface that allowed for throwing IndexError’s in some cases, if there is a real programming error in the module, it will be missed. The correct way to go about it is to create an exception hierarchy for each module, which will be the ‘communication channel’ for errors. This way, any unexpected programming error will percolate up as such, and not get missed – and any exception handling mechanism on the way can decide what do to about it (log, die, ignore, etc…).
Every exception handling rule has exceptions: when writing ‘low-level’ library modules yourself, such as a dict-like class, it makes sense to use IndexError. Don’t get confused with other library modules though – If you are writing some communication library, it should follow the same rules described above for a module.
This is an excellent way of handling exceptions. I think what you’re talking about is basically the python version of creating exception classes in Java. Each module would have it’s own exception class, and you could just handle all exception handling for each module in a single class, instead of duplicating the code around the module.