Add temporary workaround for DM-7377

[timj]

Introduce a workaround to prevent infinite recursion in the swig
catalog bindings

[timj]

Completely unimportant spelling mistake in this comment...

[timj]

Do we know where "this" is coming from and why trapping it is a good idea? More as a means to help the comment on this line.

[TallJimbo]

I'm fairly certain it's coming from Swig: I think it must be trying to get it as an attribute before it exists, while wrapping that in a try/except block. But that only works if AttributeError is actually raised when it doesn't exist (as opposed to infinite recursion).

It might be a good idea to look at the Swig generated code (if we can get enough of a traceback to find it) to confirm that this is the case, but we could defer that to DM-7377.

[timj]

Highly likely given this code in the .py file:

def _swig_setattr_nondynamic(self, class_type, name, value, static=1):
    if (name == "thisown"):
        return self.this.own(value)
    if (name == "this"):
        if type(value).__name__ == 'SwigPyObject':
            self.__dict__[name] = value
            return

so SWIG is using a "this" attribute.