Truffle gives different error messages for Ganache and for GETH about truffle-core HOT 1 OPEN

@barakman Sorry for the slow response, missed this.

More generally, a common set of error messages, regardless of the EVM used, would be ideal.

Agree. This difference goes back to the pre-byzantium chain which did not return any information about whether a transaction was successful or not. In order to make testing possible, ganache had a policy of appending errors to the response so that web3 would trigger a helpful message.

Post-byzantium, the mainnet clients append a status field to the receipt indicating whether or not a tx was successful. Additionally, ganache-cli now has a mode that emulates them. You should see the same error pattern as geth if you run it like this:

ganache-cli --noVMErrorsOnRPCResponse

The error object also contains the receipt, so you be able to catch the error and do this:

catch(err){
  parseInt(err.receipt.status) === 0 // Failure
  parseInt(err.receipt.status) === 1  // Success
} 

Truffle continues to add a message that includes key phrases like revert in order to maintain backwards compatibility with testing libraries like Zeppelin's and to provide useful information about what happened.

from truffle-core.