There's no dedicated StackOverflowErrorException, So there is no way to accurately distinguish a recursion overflow from a general RuntimeError. 

One cannot use the exception message, since the docs explicitly says that "Exception messages are not part of the Python API", and checking for

    len(traceback.extract_tb(trace)) >= sys.getrecursionlimit()-1

is ugly, and (AFAIK) not guaranteed to be correct.

Use case: I've found this while trying to create a cycle detector that will compress the traceback of such errors.

See discussion in python-ideas:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2013-September/023190.html

An cycle-detection implementation:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578660-concise-output-for-maximum-recursion-depth-exceede/

This sounds like a reasonable feature request to me.

I agree.

Attached is a patch, please review.  Introduces a RecursionError that subclasses RuntimeError for compatibility.

Note: I also tested this with RecursionError not subclassing RuntimeError, to make sure that except clauses in the test suite are sufficiently narrowed to RecursionError.

Looks good to me.

Is it possible to add it to 2.7? I think it won't break any PEP8-following code (e.g. not testing for type equality/identity)

+1

Is it going to be committed?

It's an enhancement, so it can only go in 3.5, and that will happen some time after the release of 3.4.

Ok

So what holds it back now?

+1.

This, unfortunately, can't go in 3.5 (too late), but I can commit this in 3.6.

Well that's a déjà vu.

Larry, is there any chance this can be committed in 3.5 (the change is fully backwards compatible)?

This is fine for 3.5.

New changeset a795cf73ce6f by Yury Selivanov in branch '3.5':
Issue #19235: Add new RecursionError exception. Patch by Georg Brandl.
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/a795cf73ce6f

New changeset 749d74e5dfa7 by Yury Selivanov in branch 'default':
Merge 3.5 (Issue #19235)
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/749d74e5dfa7

Thanks Larry and Georg!