[FR] Give user-friendly error messages when things go wrong rather than a stack trace

[cdfarrow]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

I appreciate that error messages from setuptools have improved a lot over the last few years, however stack traces still seem to be a regular experience. The standard Python error trace is just ugly and makes it difficult to quickly see what the problem is, and is not user-friendly. My common scenario is that I open up the .whl file in a zip viewer to verify/review the contents and often forget to close it. When I run build again, I get the error "PermissionError: [WinError 32] The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process". This is very unfriendly and yet is a simple scenario to trap and give a friendly one-line message instead of a screenful of stack trace. [Windows 11; setuptools 80.9.0]

Describe the solution you'd like

Display a friendly message such as, " is being used by another program. Please close it and try again."

Alternative Solutions

No response

Additional context

See also this issue in the build repo.

Code of Conduct

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