Re: Debug output etc, cluttering the terminal
Am Sonntag, 15. August 2010, 14:19:05 schrieb Tollef Fog Heen:
> I would guess they still fill up the .xsession-errors file, though? At
> least for me, that file is mostly useless due to:
>
> « ...Too much output, ignoring rest... »
>
> as the last line.
Yes they would, because the applications still see their stderr channel and
happily write to it. What I meant with "not an issue anymore" was the issue of
intermixed useful and useless terminal output; of course the issue of wasting
CPU and perhaps harddisk resources remains when debugging is not disabled.
Considering Holger's comment about disks filling up, the scope of this issue in
the context of resource saving and energy-efficient computing then extends to
/var/log and logging in general and includes the question of necessity and
longevity of logfiles bound to system and user sessions.
It also touches on badly written default cron jobs which are just as resource-
wasting and user-annoying for little gain, for example non-incremental index
updates. When you run a system on battery, maybe even from USB stick or SD
card, all of this equally matters.
I'm all for solving these problems, but optimistically spoken I'd be
positively surprised if Debian could turn "no user annoyance by default" into
a universally accepted, enforceable and release-goal-timed policy before 2020.
Therefore, I suggested tracking this at the per-package/per-originator level
to try getting rid of the biggest offenders first.
By doing so, the motives of the KDE-Qt/Gtk+/WINE/ALSA/... maintainers, for
example, for having the debug output enabled by default can be found out and
serve as input for a decision about a policy. I'm sure the debug areas are not
enabled by default to annoy users, this is merely a side effect :-)
Josef
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