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by jcelerier 545 days ago
But... It's not the user that is seeing this, it's the developer. You catch at the top of your event loop and you log the stack trace to some place that can be reached by the dev team, be it Jira, some crash reporting tool, etc.
1 comments
jandrese 545 days ago
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. Usually there are layers of insulation that mean your problem might be looked at in a few weeks or months only if the company thinks it might be interesting. Meanwhile you have your problem to fix and it is off to stack traces and access logs to try to figure out what went wrong. Maybe some library updated. Maybe there was a permissions change. Maybe some policy change at the OS level. Maybe some external resource went away or changed syntax. It is up to you as the end user to figure it out and fix it, or at least figure out a unique enough error message that you can Google to find someone else with the same problem.

There is nothing more frustrating than a dialog box that says "An error occurred" and then the program shuts down. Frankly I'd rather it crashed hard, at least then I might have some evidence to sift through in the blast zone.

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Groxx 545 days ago
>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.

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