What is the purpose of deleting the exception traceback

[diwu1989]

What is the point of these lines:
https://github.com/MindscapeHQ/raygun4py/blob/master/python2/raygun4py/raygunprovider.py#L78-L81

The line that's weird is:

try:
  delete ...
except Exception e:
  raise

isnt that equivalent to just straight up

delete ...

without the try except?
and why do you even need to delete those local variables, they'll get garbage collected at the interpreter's discretion

[fundead]

As it turns out they will not in fact be GC'd, as a function that is handling an exception, if the traceback is assigned to a local variable, will result in a circular reference, This is noted in the official documentation at https://docs.python.org/2/library/sys.html#sys.exc_info, in the Warning and Note blocks, and the above code is the recommended approach. Similar implementations exist in other libraries.