>Yeah, but lots of diagnostic work is done by end users in the real world. Users rarely have good access to the developer team, if the team even still exists.
And hiding details prevents them from being able to know if error X is different from error Y, yes.
It's an unhandled error at that point. You do not know what is relevant, essentially by definition, because otherwise you would have handled it.
Display messages are almost completely unrelated to error handling, and have almost completely unrelated needs. If you decide to combine them, I'm pretty convinced that it's ALWAYS better to show ALL context somewhere, because otherwise troubleshooting frequently becomes impossible. It doesn't have to be a megabyte of stack trace info in a dialog box shown all the time, save it to a file and link to it or something.
And hiding details prevents them from being able to know if error X is different from error Y, yes.
It's an unhandled error at that point. You do not know what is relevant, essentially by definition, because otherwise you would have handled it.
Display messages are almost completely unrelated to error handling, and have almost completely unrelated needs. If you decide to combine them, I'm pretty convinced that it's ALWAYS better to show ALL context somewhere, because otherwise troubleshooting frequently becomes impossible. It doesn't have to be a megabyte of stack trace info in a dialog box shown all the time, save it to a file and link to it or something.