James, The discussion of why we went to /tmp/XWin.log is in the mailing list archives. The reason was primarily that we wanted to make XWin.exe a GUI application instead of a command-line application... this is necessary to quiet the thousands of questions of "why does XWin.exe open a command prompt window when I run it?".
There are difficulties in improving the log file system as we don't know what screen numbers will be used when we create the log file. We could send initial messages to XWin.log, then redirect each screen to XWin-screenXX.log, but can you imagine having to tell users "Okay, if you have a problem that occurs early in XWin.exe initialization then you need to look at XWin.log... otherwise you need to look at XWin-screenXX.log where XX is the screen that had the problem." Yeah right, we have people that think that a sentence that reads "don't use Winzip" means that they should use Winzip. Hope that clears things up, Harold > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of James Tetazoo > Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 10:30 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Thought on /tmp/XWin.log > > > Just out of curiosity, why was XWin.exe changed to write output to > /tmp/XWin.log? I liked the previous behavior of sending it to STDOUT. > Seems to me this was more flexible since I could see the output in real > time, redirect to a file ("> /tmp/XWin.log"), or both ("| tee > /tmp/XWin.log"). > > I also just ran an experiment running 2 instances of XWin with > "-screen 0 x > y" and "-screen 1 x y" arguments. The log file from the first > instance get > overwritten by the log file from the second. > > If you don't want to go back to STDOUT, perhaps you could add the screen > number somewhere in the logfile name to fix the overwriting problem (e.g. > "/tmp/XWin.0.log", "/tmp/XWin.1.log", etc.)? > > > _________________________________________________________________ > MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: > http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx >