Bug#596634: x11-common: /etc/X11/Xsession always appends to .xsession-errors
On Mon, 13 Sep 2010, Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote:
> [I'm not a maintainer, just happened be following X bugs...]
>
> Tim Connors <reportbug@rather.puzzling.org> writes:
> > before the user gets to review them, they can always log into the
> > console and review the errors before they restart X.
>
> Always might be too strong word. On my PDA I don't have a physical
> keyboard, the only way to read .xsession-errors is via X or by
> connecting a laptop. And on my laptop switching virtual consoles
> sometimes fails if I have used suspend...
>
> > This is particularly insidious when the disk is full because something
> > was writing lots of crap to ~/.xsession-errors. That crap is not
>
> I think this is the real problem and applications should be fixed to
> limit their error output.
Yep. But sometimes wmbattery goes haywire trying to connect to HAL, or a
homegrown app might output too much. In the absense of a library to do
this (and I *really* hate it when gnome by default limits output and just
discards the rest - its limit is arbitrarily small, and I have no way of
retrieving that lost information after a certain point in a desktop
session once it starts discarding data. Fortunately, I do not use gnome
often).
> > because of too much crap emitted to ~/.xsession-errors? Well, just
> > let the unsophisticated user log out and log back in again.
>
> How about a compromise? Could we truncate all but the last 1000 lines
> in /etc/X11/Xsession?
Sure. Or perhaps 1000*80 characters (never encountered super long lines
as output to .xsession-errors, but could happen).
--
TimC
Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot. -- Rusty Russell.
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