Xsession script append to ~/.xsession-errors

[Jon Dowland]

On Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 03:58:18PM -0700, Micah J. Cowan
wrote:
> I completely disagree with this. Having stderr go to
> .xsession-errors is extremely helpful, particularly just
> after you've seen a crash.

Absolutely, I did not say otherwise. What I object to is
large quantities of verbose output when everything is
normal. This actually detracts from the usefulness of using
the stderr as a reporting device for failures, as the useful
messages are drowned out in the useless ones.

For example, this is what happens when I start 'kflickr'
from a terminal, and close it once it's started up. There
has not been a crash, or even much of an opportunity for
anything to have gone wrong:

$ kflickr 2>&1 | wc -l
68

> 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?

I'm more familiar and comfortable with the terminal. I'm
quite happy to see output from GUI apps, when it's useful to
the end-user (e.g., "DEBUG: someprogram: user clicked on
Foo" is _NOT_ useful to an end-user.)

> 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.

That stops me from seeing useful debugging messages.

> 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.

Yeah, it's non-obvious for users to read ~/.xsession-errors
if an app suddenly disappears from their screen as a result
of a crash. There are some environments which try to make
reporting such errors a bit more helpful, but I haven't seen
anything groundbreaking yet.


-- 
Jon Dowland
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20060924/0f1be2bf/attachment.pgp