Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

The curses module raises an exception curses.error with a message of the form "XXX() returned ERR" where XXX is generally the name of the C or Python function that was just called. Most of the time, XXX and the Python function that was called have the same name and XXX is a real curses C function or macro. However, in some cases, this is not the case and the actual curses function that was called has a different name.

For debugging purposes, I suggest adding an attribute to the exception class, say .funcname which holds the name of the macro / function that was called at runtime in the C code. This will help users debug issues. For compatibility reasons, I will not change the current error messages since this could break CI in the wild. In addition, I don't expect users to extract the function name from the error message (if they want to, they should use this new attribute).

I considered also adding which Python function was the bad one, but since the exception is raised from a Python function, I think it's better not to do include an other attribute. If needed, we can always add it later but for now the curses C function name is more important.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-125843: indicate which C function caused a curses.error #125844
• gh-125843: fix test_curses.test_attributes on x86-64 macOS #134252