The problem is that thread_obj.start() returns immediately. The child thread that you spawned executes in its own context, with its own stack. Any exception that occurs there is in the context of the child thread, and it is in its own stack. One way I can think of right now to communicate this information to the parent thread is by using some sort of message passing, so you might look into that.
Try this on for size:
import sys
import threading
import Queue
class ExcThread(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, bucket):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.bucket = bucket
def run(self):
try:
raise Exception('An error occured here.')
except Exception:
self.bucket.put(sys.exc_info())
def main():
bucket = Queue.Queue()
thread_obj = ExcThread(bucket)
thread_obj.start()
while True:
try:
exc = bucket.get(block=False)
except Queue.Empty:
pass
else:
exc_type, exc_obj, exc_trace = exc
# deal with the exception
print exc_type, exc_obj
print exc_trace
thread_obj.join(0.1)