Xsession script append to ~/.xsession-errors

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 10:32:00AM +0100, Jon Dowland wrote:
> Lea Gris wrote:
> > I have manually edited /etc/X11/Xsession and changed the offending line to:
> > exec >"$ERRFILE" 2>&1
> > 
> > If there is already a bug report on-line please gives references.
> 
> It might be worth reporting bugs on the packages which create a great 
> deal of output on their stdout/stderr filehandles, too. As you've 
> noticed, people aren't likely to actually see that output when it's 
> appended to .xsession-errors. That sort-of behaviour is often used for 
> debugging messages which should not be enabled in production builds and 
> can be very frustrating when one launches such an application from a 
> terminal. KDE seems to be a particularly bad offender at the moment.

I completely disagree with this. Having stderr go to .xsession-errors is
extremely helpful, particularly just after you've seen a crash. There's
no reason not to have it do so (except when, as above, you have an
Xsession that just keeps appending messages, filling up disk
space--that's a bug in the Xsession, not in the program sending text to
stderr).

Also, if you don't like to see output from GUI apps, why would you
launch them from the terminal? Why wouldn't you use the app launcher,
since that's what it's for? If you need to be able to launch it from the
terminal, it's very simple to redirect stdout and stderr to /dev/null.
If that becomes tedious, set up an alias.

IMHO, Not having diagnostic output from GUI apps is one of the things
that are very wrong with typical Windows and MacOS apps, not what's
right about them.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/