Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Dear all,

Soji just asked on the Sympa discussion channel why eiro wants to use 
autodie.

I'll try an answer here.

First: Sympatic: The idea of Sympatic is to give future developers a 
boilerplate: include all modules that should be used wherever in Sympa. 
So adding "use Sympatic;" includes a bunch of modules; adding "use 
Sympatic -oo" includes the same modules plus Moo.

Second: autodie. it's included in Sympatic. Using this modules will 
raise a die whenever the code can't succeed. eiro's argument is to make 
sure an exception will be raised whenever the code does not behave as 
intended.

The argument in favour of this module is the decreasing number of lines 
to maintina to raise exceptions.

The argument against it, in my opinion, is that, when reading a piece of 
code, we won't know that an exception can be raised in that exact place. 
I think we should maintain a minimum level of hand-made exceptions with 
explicit exception typing to be able to handle them correctly; the idea 
is that, in some cases, exceptions should make Sympa die, and in other 
cases it should not.

What is your opinion on this?

Regards,

David

--
"Mieux vaut viser la perfection et la rater que viser la médiocrité et 
l'atteindre."
- Francis Blanche

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