GalSim-developers/GalSim — pull request #318 by rmjarvis (2012-12-03 20:40:14+00:00)
Title: Test if c++ exceptions are propagated up to python (#317)

Rachel discovered that on her system, c++ exceptions show up in python as "unidentifiable C++ exception" rather than whatever text the exception would normally have. I believe this is due to an incompatibility between the compiler used for GalSim and the one used for python. (Rachel's python was compiled with a previous MacOS version, which is likely the problem in this case.)

I don't think there is any real fix for this, but I added a test in SCons to see if this is happening for the user's build. If so, a warning is emitted to warn the user that their error texts may not be very explanatory.

Reiko, I think this happened in #288 for one of your systems. Could you try this branch for that system to see if you get a reasonable warning message?

Others can try this branch too, but it shouldn't be a significant change for most people.