Bug#977834: sddm: [X11] SessionLogFile option does not work, .xsession-errors used instead
Package: sddm
Version: 0.19.0-2
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: shadowm2006@gmail.com
Dear Maintainer,
sddm in Debian is currently unable to honour the SessionLogFile= option in the
[X11] section of /etc/sddm.conf. Even when the option is not present, the
default is to use ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log to write stdout/stderr
for user-launched applications, but in practice the messages end up in
~/.xsession-errors -- which I might add is allowed to grow indefinitely, as I
found the file for my user account to be approximately 28.4 GB in size after
almost 4 years.
>From a quick glance at the startup scripts after noticing that this issue does
not occur in other distributions (e.g. openSUSE), I found out that
/etc/X11/Xsession (which I assume gets sourced by sddm some way or another
during login) redirects both file descriptors to ~/.xsession-errors in append
mode without any mechanism within the script or elsewhere for changing the file
path or respecting sddm's options. I believe that this script does not count as
a configuration file so any local changes would be overwritten by apt any time
its parent package (x11-common) gets upgraded.
I can see that whether I set [X11] SessionLogFile= to a non-default value or
leave it unspecified, the file that *should* be used will be created but ends
up abandoned with a size of 0 bytes while messages get written to ~/.xsession-
errors instead.
The reason I'm filing this bug against sddm instead of x11-common is that I'm
not entirely sure if this is a bug in the sddm packaging (e.g. a Debian-
specific factor about x11-common that isn't taken into account in sddm). Since
I haven't used a different display manager in years myself I also ignore if
other display managers suffer from this same bug or deal with this situation in
a different fashion. Feel free to reassign to any other package as needed.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
APT prefers unstable-debug
APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 5.9.15-hanacore-162 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages sddm depends on:
ii adduser 3.118
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.74
ii libc6 2.31-5
ii libgcc-s1 10.2.1-1
ii libpam0g 1.3.1-5
ii libqt5core5a 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii libqt5dbus5 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii libqt5gui5 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii libqt5network5 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii libqt5qml5 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii libqt5quick5 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii libstdc++6 10.2.1-1
ii libsystemd0 247.1-3
ii libxcb-xkb1 1.14-2
ii libxcb1 1.14-2
ii qml-module-qtquick2 5.15.2+dfsg-2
ii x11-common 1:7.7+21
ii xauth 1:1.0.10-1
ii xserver-xephyr [xserver] 2:1.20.10-1
ii xserver-xorg [xserver] 1:7.7+21
ii xvfb [xserver] 2:1.20.10-1
Versions of packages sddm recommends:
ii haveged 1.9.13-1
ii libpam-systemd 247.1-3
ii sddm-theme-breeze [sddm-theme] 4:5.20.4-3
ii sddm-theme-debian-breeze [sddm-theme] 4:5.19.5-5+b1
Versions of packages sddm suggests:
ii libpam-kwallet5 5.20.4-1
pn qtvirtualkeyboard-plugin <none>
-- debconf information:
* shared/default-x-display-manager: sddm
sddm/daemon_name: /usr/bin/sddm
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