We need a way to show ~/.xsession-errors to the user

[jdreed]

Upstream is clearly not interested in doing anything useful with .xsession-errors, and we desperately need a way to display it to the user without them having to log in to the dialups.

Terrible ideas are welcome.

[jdreed]

Hrm. #715 sort of fixes this, in that you can at least log in and fix some stuff if your GNOME session is broken. But, logging in with the new "Athena Terminal Mode" option will overwrite .xsession-errors, because gdm will happily do that.

So this should probably become a "Distant Future" ticket where we push for gdm to suck less.

[geofft]

LP #771661 was fixed earlier today, which allows .xsession-errors to be a symlink (i.e., it only removes the old .xsession-errors if it's not). We can now symlink it into /tmp, or a fifo in /var/run connected to tee /tmp/.xsession-errors ~/.xsession-errors.real, or something.

[jdreed]

So in the lightdm world, we own the greeter and can do whatever we want with it. I wonder if the right thing here is to check for a non-zero return from schroot in reactivate, and if we find it, copy the user's ~/.xsession-errors locally while we still have tokens, show it to them in the lightdm cleanup script, and then dispose of it.