Sorry for not answering such a long time. It's because my question originated from a discussion within our company which moved out of focus shortly after I posted, and over waiting for some response from them before replying here, I forgot about it.
Steve Holden wrote: >> - f might catch E exceptions from the implementation and raise some >> other error in their stead, maybe with an appropriate message or >> treating the traceback in some helpful way. This destroys the original >> exception. >> > My "solution", of course, takes this approach. Good to see that my "gut feeling" as to the most pythonic approach seems to coincide with the answers I've received ;o) -- Thomas -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list