Re: a suggestion about error-messages

[James Wilkinson <jamesw student unsw edu au>]

On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

>> > sent to stdout/stderr, but I cant see that if the program has been
>> > launched from a panel / menu. If f.x. I make a launcher in the
>> > Gnome-panel which tries to execute the command "sklhgsd" (which
>> > obviously doesnt exists) I can just push the button forever whithout
>> > ever being informed that the command doesnt exist.
>
>Agreed.

Hi all, long time listener, first time caller..

The original poster complained about a lack of error messages for programs
started from the panel.  Allow me to tell a story:

Once apon a time, when X was first invented, and people used twm and a
crude widget set, people started programs from a popup root menu.  Now,
when they started programs from an xterm, stdout/stderr was displayed in
the xterm!  But what about those started from the root menu?  The unix
model of processes allowed a processes' children to inherit things like
stdin/out/err from itself.  And so these original hackers found their
stdout going to the tty that they started X from!

Anyway, the point of this story is that they went and wrote xconsole, a
nifty litte program that traps output to X's tty, and displays it on the X
display.

I may have missed the point of the question, but that is an already
existing answer to what I thought it was asking, and why reinvent the
wheel?  It would be an easy task to port xconsole to be a GNOME applet...
unless such a task has already been done.

Oh, and there's a few others, like rootlogger, which effectovely does a
tail -f and displays it on the root window.  This, again, could be ported
to be a GNOME applet, or this idea used for a xconsole port.

Sorry for the tone, but I thought the answer was perfectly obvious :)

-- 
jamesw

    "A 32 bit extension and graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit
operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 
2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition."
    "What is Windows 95?"
------------------------------
jamesw@student.unsw.edu.au