Question about error handling design in request functions

[L-cloud]

Hello,

I'm a new user of this project and I've been trying to implement it in my own code. While working with it, I noticed a pattern in the error handling across request functions like _send_pycurl_request and _send_urllib_request that I'd like to understand better.

Both of these functions catch exceptions and return None in error cases:

# In _send_pycurl_request
except pycurl.error as err:
    LOGGER.error("pycurl error: %s %s", url, err)
    # ...
    return None

# In _send_urllib_request
except Exception as err:
    LOGGER.error("download error: %s %s", url, err)
    return None

This makes it challenging for calling code (like fetch_url and fetch_response) to determine:

1. Whether an error occurred
2. What type of error occurred
3. How to handle specific error cases

I'm wondering if there's a specific design reason for returning None instead of raising exceptions or returning a more informative error response? Are there plans to enhance the error handling approach in future versions?

I understand there might be good architectural reasons for this design that I'm missing as a new user, so I appreciate any insight you can provide.

Thank you!