Two summers ago I raised the idea that Slackware does not have an global way to create a $HOME/.xsession-errors log.

I was going to repost in the Requests for Current thread, but then decided to first open the floor to discussion.

Globally creating $HOME/.xsession-errors would be a nice touch.

With each new X session, copying $HOME/.xsession-errors to $HOME/.xsession-errors.bak would be nicer.

Anticipating the discussion:

* The file is created when using xdm (/etc/X11/xdm/Xsession) but that is not a global solution. Possibly an easy solution is copy that snippet to /etc/X11/Xsession.

* Is the log file useful? Like many features, for some people yes and others no.

* The log file can grow massively and can quickly fill disk space, especially with a runaway process. True, but in almost two decades of using Linux systems I recall seeing that happen only once (although not important, on a non Slackware system).

Please share your proposals.

My hope for the thread is perhaps Pat will select one of the suggested methods and in his usual way, add spit and polish.

Thanks everybody!

Whenever I've had a problem within ~/.xsession , the screen output of xorg failures/warnings/etc have been sufficient to inform a fix. Otherwise, on a
stock Slackware system I imagine the log would stay pretty freaking empty!

I use kdm and ~/.xsession to log in to xfce, the .xsession-errors file is created automaticcally (and is certainly not empty, currently it contains 3690 lines!).
Most of them are of the form
(and all of them are harmless).

It depends on what you run. Many GTK apps are very noisy throwing out warnings all the time thanks to the gtk/gnome guys constantly changing the api or deprecating stuff and the app developers not managing to keep up with the changes.

As a command-line jockey, I really detest it when apps abuse stderr like that.

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+1. At least they could make those warnings optional at compile or run time.

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