Design a user-friendly error reporting policy and mechanism for the viewer

[jleibs]

Context

Right now we have two main ways of reporting errors:

• re_log::error! results in a pop-up in the viewer.
• Some UI widgets specifically catch errors and map them to re_ui.error_text

A common source of errors is due to deserialization of components, whether from the data-store or blueprint store. These will both continue to be an issue at varying degrees until we have proper forward/backwards compatibility.

Where we use error_text vs error! is mostly ad-hoc at the moment resulting in inconsistent and problematic experiences such as:

• Fix deserialization log spam when trying to load old blueprint #4299

Requests

• One obvious / consistent way to handle errors across all different parts of the viewer code (during system execution, during blueprint handling, during UI building, etc.)
• Deserialization errors should be returned somehow attached to the entity --> if I click an entity I should be able to see which components are failing to deserialize. Ideally visible in the timeline as well.
• Minimize usage of ephemeral pop-ups. Errors should go to a more persist error-log reachable through the UI.
• Ability to attach stack-trace without just throwing it into the error string as text.

[emilk]

Related:

• Create special log messages that bottom out in analytics events instead of showing in the viewer #4433
• Panel with recent log/notification messages #4304