So, I actually think this is the type of error handling changes that we don't want to make. These errors are already being reported by earlier code and this just overwrites the initial error with a new one. We used to do this, but our policy has been not to. I'm curious if this is the type if fix that @ethomson was looking for?

It's not what I was talking about, no. This feels orthogonal to what I was talking about.

Is the error message before this PR very bad? (Sorry, I don't have the code in front of me.)

@arrbee This commit is 10 months old or so and has been cherry picked while #1199 was being rebased. I was more or less expecting this reaction, this is what I pushed it separately ;-)

Closing.