Every now and then (e.g. when upgrading the nvidia driver), some application (e.g. chrome browser) starts misbehaving. And yes, of course that is the individual applications fault.
However, applications have bugs. And any such bug - e.g. one that causes a web browser to log a warning to stderr - can currently be trivially exploited to fill the users disk. In my opinion, we need to: - treat this file like a true log file, in particular: - allow rotation without having to restart the complete X session - allow for duplicate filtering ala syslog (the last message repeated 1000 times) - track for such misbehaviour, and assist the user in cleaning up before his disk fills. Xsession shouldn't just blame the applications. IMHO, the handling of .xsession-errors is a bad misconception in the first place; passing the descriptor of a single file to every process in the session is actually quite a bad idea. Xsession *must not* assume that all these applications are well-behaved, bug-free and don't write crap to stderr; in particular not without giving the user an obvious way of clearing the mess at runtime (apparently, you can recover by doing a truncate --size 0 $HOME/.xsession-errors which I havn't tried yet. If you delete the file instead of truncating, you have to log out and restart your whole Xsession) And that is the whole point: While Xsession cannot fix all the broken applications out there, it should at least have an easy way to recover from a misbehaving application. Ideally, it would also have some protection (such as: duplicate detection, rate control) in place against such misbehaving applications, so this cannot be exploited. Maybe, instead of passing a file descriptor to the log file to each application, instead pass a file descriptor of a logger process that supports SIGUSR1 to reopen the log file and/or pausing the log and/or duplicate detection. Regards, Erich -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-x-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cagkbab_gmjbmbw6f5ywk8kejsw0w0fjab7qi21vrojena3l...@mail.gmail.com
