On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Simon Willison

I'm not expert on the history of this or anything, but I always
thought this example was the basis for silent errors. That makes me
wonder, then, if there's some other kind of separation we can have.
Perhaps variable lookups continue to fail silently, regardless of
environment, while actual {% ... %} tags raise errors by default.

Of course, there's still something to be said for using DEBUG to show
errors in development, while not in production, and individual tags
would obviously be able to suppress their own errors if they choose
to, but I think it might work.

And at the risk of supplying too many possibilities for one email, the
magic_quotes problem could be avoided similarly to autoescaping.
Essentially, provide an extra argument to all the template rendering
functions, with a default based on the DEBUG (or other) setting.
Something like def render(self, context, silent_errors=not
settings.DEBUG). Then, individual apps can specify their behavior
explicitly if they need to, while relying on the setting if they
don't.

I'm probably way off-base on these ideas, though, because it would
likely lead to a lot of "hey, why is this template erroring out, while
this other one isn't?" I dunno. This email was probably too
stream-of-consciousness to be of any use. But there it is.

-Gul