xsession.errors next question

[Nils Kassube]

Ray Parrish wrote:
> Nils Kassube wrote:
> > Ray Parrish wrote:
> >> Well, no one's answering, so I guess I stumped the group. On this
> >> question and all of the other ones I asked about error messages in
> >> the xsession file.
> >>
> >> I really haven't found this group to be much of a help yet with any
> >> errors I encounter. I do learn a little bit from the answers to
> >> other people, but when I ask one, no-one seems to know the answer.
> >
> > I think the reason is that nobody cares about what is in
> > the .xsession-errors file. After all nearly every KDE application
> > spits out tons of warnings which all land in this file. IMHO the file
> > name is a bit misleading, i.e. it should rather be
> > .xsession-warnings.
>
> Errors, warning messages... what's the difference? Something's not
> working right, and I'd like to know what it is and fix it if possible.

My definition of the difference is this. A warning is given if something 
unexpected but non-fatal happens during the operation of a program and 
the operation continues. An error would be an explanation for something 
fatal where the program can't continue. Here is an example for a warning 
from my .xsession-errors file:

| kdecore (KAction): WARNING: KAction::plugAccel(): call to deprecated
| action. 

The warning might be interesting for the programmer to know that a 
specific function call should be eleminated for future versions of the 
program but it isn't fatal because the deprecated function is still 
available. IMHO, these warnings should be disabled for a release but 
obviously the developers seem to disagree.

And here is a real error:

| /etc/X11/Xsession.d/30xorg-common_xresources: line 13: run_parts:
| command not found 

Here something tried to execute a program that doesn't exist. Maybe 
something doesn't work properly, but I didn't notice a problem until now. 
This might be a bug, but I don't know what it is about.

In both cases I wouldn't expect to find someone on this list who knows how 
to eliminate the problem. Of course you could file bugs for each of the 
messages you find in your .xsession-errors file. But IMHO that would be 
futile unless you can at least find out what action triggered the 
message.

> Some of the questions I asked seemed to be security related to me, like
> the one about an ssh connection already being open... why is an ssh
> connection opening when I'm not using it for anything?

Yes, that's a really interesting question but I can't help you there.


Nils