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I'm done with NextCloud
(ymmel.nl)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I'm not done but I'm so tired of just stupid error messages that don't help from developers. I love the open source community but for gods sake devs, handle your errors in a format that makes sense.
Nextcloud or others, it's always the same. I either get a 200 line stacktrace that means absolutely nothing to me because the dev didn't bother to handle the exception (like you submit a form and get a null reference back. It sure would be nice to know what field was null) or of course the infamous "Exception occurred" and nothing else.
My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like "x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?" Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can't even with that
Out of interest, which PR was that?
It's uncommon to rewrite exception messages to be user friendly, they are for developers. The exception shouldn't be thrown in the first place if it's a common issue or the error message should be more generic for unhandled problems.
I strongly disagree with this, any error message shown to the user should be helpful to the user
I think you misunderstood, this is about exceptions, which shouldn't be shown to users unless they ask for it.
Exceptions are not helpful to users most of the time, as shown above. They need instructions on how to report issues instead since they most likely can't fix an unhandled exception by themselves.
Underrated comment.
To put it into user perspective:
Exception X with error code xxx means Y. Y should be shown via a modal dialog to the user. The state of the application has to be reverted to a valid state as error handling.
The exception/error gets logged, the user doesn't receive a exception but the interpretation of the error is shown to him via the UI.
ehh I try to keep me here and my real github separate. I'm all for exception messages being for developers especially in logs, but things also shouldn't error silently either. This was a case where there was something different with my OS I was running and I wanted to show an error that there was a common reason for that exception being thrown. This was years ago though, so I don't remember details
I'm also a develop and my philosophy is that stack traces are for the developers but they should be translated to informative error messages for the user. Otherwise you're doing security through obscurity.