Making EPERM friendlier

What an application wants to know is: what happened, what should I tell the user, and what should I do next?

Take what to do next: Does it matter? Should you loop around and retry? Should you back up to the file selection interface and retry? Should you terminate cleanly (ie, telling the user WTF just happened, at the cost of more resources)? Is it so severe you should throw up your hands and exit uncleanly to give the system the best chance to bounce back?

If you go an add a bazillion more integer values then the "what to do next" problem becomes a bazillion times harder. One thing which a redesign should do is to stop the overloading of errno with meaning.