X error log

[Rocco Stanzione]

On Wednesday 29 March 2006 15:50, Scott Bronson wrote:
> Branden's not known for his bedside manner.  But the dude is smart and
> very productive.

I hate it when people who command respect are impossible to like.

> .xsession-errors is meant for errors.  Errors!  Gnome and KDE apps,
> though, manage to fill it with megabytes of useless warnings.

If not gigabytes.  The issue never showed up on my radar until I found 
my /home partition full and, since .xsession-errors doesn't show up in 
a "du -sh *" glob, eventually found a 12GB .xsession-errors. I didn't bother 
investigating what had filled it up, but it can't be that hard to have some 
kind of check on that, can it?

> Unfortunately, I think the cat is out of the bag on this one.  There's
> no way you're going to change every single Gnome and KDE app to not spew
> wads of garbage while they run.

I similarly wish gconf would stop polluting my syslog.  I don't even run 
gnome!

> Reluctantly, I agree.  It should be truncated.  It's a shameful
> situation though.  It would be nice to somehow pipe all Gnome and KDE
> output to /dev/null so that .xsession-errors can become useful again.

That definitely impairs its usefulness.  That's less of a severe problem, 
though, than its unchecked growth.  Perhaps it should just be rotated (a 
default crontab entry?) to .old now and then similarly to Xorg.$DISPLAY.log.

Rocco Stanzione