Further information on requests returning an error

[jen20]

There are occasions where it is desirable to be able to get more information about a failed request. For example, upon deleting a machine, it is useful to be able to poll using GetMachine in order to determine when it has actually been deleted.

Unfortunately at the moment there is no way beyond string parsing (that I have found - not to say it doesn't exist!) to determine that a call to GetMachine failed because the machine does not exist versus for example a transient network failure - this includes traversing the Error type in the github.com/joyent/gocommon/errors package. It would be useful if in the case of error, some additional request context could be included on a struct to which one could type assert the error - for example the status code.

Is there a simpler way of knowing that, for example, a call to GetMachine has failed because of a 410 response code rather than a transient network failure?