Re: The emacs_backtrace "feature"

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > Where does Gnome redirect the error output from Emacs?

I believe it's done at a lower level than GNOME.  Here's what Gentoo's
xsession does:

----------------------------------------------------------------
# redirect errors to a file in user's home directory if we can
for errfile in "$HOME/.xsession-errors" "${TMPDIR-/tmp}/xses-$USER" "/tmp/xses-$USER"
do
	if ( cp /dev/null "$errfile" 2> /dev/null )
	then
		chmod 600 "$errfile"
		exec > "$errfile" 2>&1
		break
	fi
done
----------------------------------------------------------------

Indeed, various boring messages (SCIM startup, in particular) are
captured there.

My window manager is Fluxbox, whose session-starter has code to do the
same, to ~/.fluxbox-errors.

Debian's Xsession script does something similar.

Of course this doesn't help much if you usually start apps from the
command line.  I typically start them using M-! or a shell buffer, so
the output ends up in a buffer rather than the session manager's
xsession-errors.