friendly messages

[Guy Harris]

>Ah, but Guy, if the phone system were more like VMS then they'd surely
>have to charge you for unanswered calls and the like or they'd go
>broke!

I neither want UNIX nor the phone system to be "more like VMS" in that
regard.  I just want them to be less prone to withholding information
from me when reporting an error, since that information could allow me
more quickly to fix the problem they're reporting.  I also don't want to
see people equating "better error messages" with "error messages like
VMS", either when arging against better error messages or when trying to
improve them!