Over broad exception catching (except Exception)

[joneskoo]

I have an issue where I'm running pyelftools and need to interrupt processing. I'm calling pyelftools from a Celery task. Celery cancels tasks by raising an celery.exceptions.Terminated exception. pyelftools unfortunately catches this and as a result, my task does not get cancelled.

As a fix, all occurences of except Exception should be changed to catch more specific exceptions, such as IOError, ValueError etc.

I did not track which of the exceptions I'm hitting yet, but here's one example of offending try-except: https://github.com/eliben/pyelftools/blob/master/elftools/construct/core.py#L352

Any chance someone familiar with the pyelftools internals could determine which exceptions actually need to be caught and make the changes? Here's a list.

$ git grep --line-number "except Exception"
elftools/construct/core.py:238:        except Exception as e:
elftools/construct/core.py:352:        except Exception as ex:
elftools/construct/core.py:357:        except Exception as ex:
elftools/construct/core.py:903:                except Exception:
elftools/construct/debug.py:113:        except Exception:
elftools/construct/debug.py:124:        except Exception:

[eliben]

The problem here is that your code paths point to construct, which is a sub-library. This change would first need to be made upstream in construct.

[joneskoo]

Thanks @eliben . I'll see about reporting this to further upstream.