Recipe errors cause slave exit

[wbell]

We're using some of the recipe commands in xmltools to generate reports during builds. A recent build failed in such a way that the input xml file for a transform() recipe statement didn't exist.

This failure causes the slave to exit-- an exception is thrown out of the xmltools transform method, which is thrown upwards. Additionally, on the build pane, the build looks like it's in progress (because the slave abruptly exits.)

It's clear that the implementation of xmltools thinks it should throw exceptions on errors (it's verified in the tests.)

What's the policy on exceptions in recipe steps? My intuition is that the slave should never exit as a result of running code in a recipe step, and when it encounters an exception in recipe steps, should mark the step as failed with an appropriate error.

Any thoughts? If we're ok going this way, all I'd propose to do is put a blanket exception handler around Step.execute() (recipe.py) rather than the subset of exceptions that are there.