Should block ability to stumble into infinite while loop in percentile calculation for dff

[EricThomson]

When calculating dff there is a percentile calculation that has a try/except block in a while loop. If the exception is triggered every run, the while loop never breaks. 😱 I ran into this today. We should fix this design flaw

CaImAn/caiman/utils/stats.py

Line 184 in 344a7e5

while err:

[EricThomson]

Yikes this is a consequence of functions being deprecated in scipy. Will temporarily lock to < 1.12 for now and am adding to roadmap to fix. (Actually I found a better fix for now, but this is going to be a headache: adding to roadmap to just uncork warning and handle all deprecation warnings).

[kushalkolar]

Oh my, I cannot comprehend the amount of 🍝 in that function 😂 . This is also an example of why bare except is generally a bad idea. From a first glance this could be remedied by adding a finally block and putting a counter inside the except and use the finally block to force exiting the loop if more than n exceptions are raised. But given how deeply nested that function is, I think it can just be designed better.

[EricThomson]

Kushal -- I started with a counter, but I ended up unhappy with this approach as it leaves the smelly code in there. 😄 As you said, it can be designed better. The problem in this case is that it depends (after you go down the stack enough) on a deprecated function, so it will always hit the counter limit. I need to do a comprehensive sweep of Caiman for soon-to-be deprecated functions! There are lots of them.

[EricThomson]

Fixed with #1288