Right, but the most critical fix—showing something in the error dialog—was backported. I think we can live with that, unless the lack of scrolling is making it impossible to see error details. (See https://github.com/jglick/jenkins/compare/printStackTrace-JDK-6507809 for another angle on this.)

Exactly, scrolling is the problem here. Attached some screenshots. "unscrollable-framed" is how it's currently backported to 1.532.2-RC, "scrollable-plain" is how it was released in 1.546. Note the scroll bar It's basically useless on a ~19" screen with 1280x1024, and even the larger screen just adds more frames from servlet filters and winstone. You effectively only get the message of the first wrapped exception, which is probably much less useful than this example in many cases.

Your inversion of stack traces looks really interesting as well and would make them much more accessible in general. For reference, program in comment to linked JDK issue (slightly modified to fit in one file) produces following output:

$ java Throwable_printStackTrace
Throwable_printStackTrace$LowLevelException
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.e(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:31)
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.d(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:28)
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.c(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:22)
Caused: Throwable_printStackTrace$MidLevelException
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.c(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:24)
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.b(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:18)
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.a(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:12)
Caused: Throwable_printStackTrace$HighLevelException
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.a(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:14)
	at Throwable_printStackTrace.main(Throwable_printStackTrace.java:5)

Code changed in jenkins
User: Daniel Beck
Path:
core/src/main/resources/jenkins/model/Jenkins/oops.jelly
core/src/main/resources/lib/form/apply/apply.js
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/fb738ea6de6bbcc7480705d53995cd8ec88e6f40
Log:
JENKINS-20772 Only show error message in dialog

This change removes the superfluous UI elements around the error
message if possible. Otherwise, fall back to existing behavior
of adding entire page to iframe.

(cherry picked from commit b856cc2434b33ed7fec3492223e141747369bba3)

Code changed in jenkins
User: Daniel Beck
Path:
core/src/main/resources/lib/form/apply/apply.js
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/7b9b7ac162d9ae5acbb313d08b69a8f71ab08804
Log:
JENKINS-20772 Fix scrolling

(cherry picked from commit 9b947ae8a239023482b8dcdec97d37425c42be8c)

Compare: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/compare/867a35523c2f...7b9b7ac162d9

Code changed in jenkins
User: Jesse Glick
Path:
war/src/main/webapp/scripts/hudson-behavior.js
http://jenkins-ci.org/commit/jenkins/9620057a58dc07b52752683a433e200f36d4317d
Log:
When a server error is caught by applyErrorMessage (“ERROR” link), do not render the whole oops.jelly page.
Just pick out the <div id="error-description"> from JENKINS-20772.

Compare: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/compare/7ddc6be48716...9620057a58dc