Inspired by a real situation that isn't interesting. Suffice to say that I'm both the author and user of the program and the errors represent bugs I need to fix, so I'm interested in every error, but there may be a lot of them.

Some precepts:

• An error can be more than one line. Do not conflate “errors” with “lines of error output”. By “error”, I mean “one discrete thing that went wrong”, regardless of how many lines are used to display it.
• I'm primarily thinking of a command-line program (because that's what I'm writing) and communicating the breadth of errors without spamming the terminal.
• The errors in question may be heterogenous, so the first n are not necessarily representative of the full set of them.
• The errors are independent; no error is the cause of another error (though they may be caused by the same underlying fault).