Just a few minutes ago, while copying 63 GB worth of pics and videos from my phone to my laptop, KDE forwarded me the error "File <hard to retain name.jpg> could not be opened. Retry, Ignore, Ignore all, Cancel".
This was around file 7000 out of 15000. The file transfer stopped until I made a choice.
As a user, what am I supposed to do with such a popup?
It seems like a very good example of "Eror Handling Without Purpose" as the article describes, but at user level.
Except that here, the audience is "a plain user who just dragged a folder to make a copy" and none of the four options (or even the act of stopping the file transfer until an answer is chosen) is actually meaningful for the user.
The "Putting It Together" for this scenario should look like: a non-modal section populates with "file <hard to retain name.jpg> failed due to reason; at the end of the file transfer you'll get a list with all the files that failed, and you'll have an option to retry them, navigate to their source position to double-check, and/or ignore".