I know that it blows up on fatal errors, and I know that you can have it report or not report errors (error_reporting), but how would I, say, make it terminate with a backtrace if I attempt to fopen a file that I don't have permissions to open? The proper behavior in PHP is to check your file descriptors, but I'd much rather it just give up and go home, since behavior after a failure like that is going to be unpredictable in many cases.
I assume you are talking about fopen-type of functions that are nothing more but wrappers around C standard library functionality.
Use SplFileObject (part of SPL that is part of PHP core) for object-oriented way to manipulate files. On a failure (like your permission issue) it throws Exceptions and if not handled this will result in a "hard" error with a backtrace log.
Awesome, thank you. I'm a bit rusty on best practices since I've shifted my focus away from php, but it's nice to know that options to make it behave a bit more high level exist.