On #2603958: Location of settings.php is not provided in access denied mesage in update.php someone was complaining about the message they get when they try to run update.php and they are not logged in as user 1.
So that is a separate issue, but the patch they provided showed me that this was a message that is ***untranslated*** coming from an Exception.
It is really not OK for the update system to just let this exception message be shown. Not being logged in as user 1 is a common circumstance, and exception messages are not translated, because they're intended to be used during module development, not for end users/administrators of sites.
So we need to make sure that places like this are catching exceptions and instead putting comprehensible, translated error messages on the screen. Putting English-only developer/exception messages on the screen, in cases like this where it's a common problem and a reasonable error message is needed, is really not OK.
