For the first, what you're suggesting would be except: fontsize = 11 ?? I did test what happens if diff_fontsize is not there in chirp.config and what I submitted handles it. Does that cover your concern?
Well, you can ignore this for the moment. In general, it's bad form to catch Exception, which will swallow anything. It's better to catch the actual thing you're expecting, so that if anything unexpected happens, it bubbles up and gets noticed.
However, I see that the ChirpConfigProxy wrapper is not going to raise a sane exception for the case you're going to hit here. So, I'll retract my comment on the grounds that my code you're calling is kinda broken :)
I'll look at specifying some weird fontsize and see if I can get an exception generated and make sure it's handled. I thought about bounds checking, but I figured the users are developers and could deal with the results of specifying something strange. But if it's just a try/except clause, seems worth it.
Well, just see what happens. If it's something we can just log to the debug log that the size was unsupported and default back to 11, that seems like a good idea.
--Dan