"How much do we care about special method lookup?" Python recently bypasses __getattr__ entirely when looking up context managers. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-May/089535.html

Could this be the reason that ZODB's transaction module, which attempts to be a context manager by declaring

manager = ThreadTransactionManager()
__enter__ = manager.get
__exit__ = manager.__exit__

Does not work in Python 2.7.1 on Ubuntu 11.04 or RHEL5? Frustratingly, the exception is no more specific than an AttributeError, even though hasattr(transaction, '__exit__')?

I would prefer to never get AttributeError: transaction.__exit__ when hasattr(transaction, '__exit__') as I find that to be very confusing. Maybe the interpreter could raise SpecialAttributeError('transaction.__exit__ is not sufficiently special') instead.

http://svn.zope.org/repos/main/transaction/trunk/transaction/__init__.py