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It’s important for errors to be human-readable off the wire. If they were proto-encoded, you couldn’t get at them easily with tcpdump, and you couldn’t read erroring response bodies from curl, and you couldn’t read errors shipped to stuff like rollbar.

Hopefully, the complexity is encapsulated by the generated client.

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What about allowing/respecting an Accept header in the Request? In @doh's case, if the client only specified Accept: application/protobuf that would override the default behavior of returning JSON encoded errors.

That’s a pretty good idea. It does expand the complexity of the client a bit, but at least it’s in an opt-in way so it doesn’t strictly need to be done for cross-language clients.

But what would the benefit(s) to users be? If they are deserializing a protobuf error, they are almost certainly using a generated client, so I don’t think they will know or care how the error was encoded.

(This might be better as a github issue to keep a visible record of the design for others.)

I think it depends who the user is in your case. In mine it's the developer who has to work with Twirp outside of the standard libraries (maybe different language, maybe just wants to incorporate it in their own code, ...).

I also like when things are consistent without surprising behavior.

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