[conspire] Dapper & Easyubuntu

[Paul Reiber]

> > Sounds like a good contribution to xfree.org. Maybe you can look at the
> > code and add that.
>
> Don't blame the X server. It's the individual applications that are the
> offenders here.

Daniel - that's more of the same "whack-a-mole" approach, only moved
from the user's responsibility (i.e. like I do - running xterm -hold
-e firefox) to being the application developer's responsibility.

Besides that... how can a dead process manage a window showing the
user the errors it had as it died?  Every application would have to
have its own monitor application, similar to my kludged-together
semi-solution with xterm.

I agree with Adrien that the best place to nail this problem would be
within the X server itself - not even counting on the particular
window manager to handle the problem... since the window manager
itself may have multiple processes that come and go and each have
their own stderr/stdout to contend with...

It's still foggy... but I'm beginning to see a few ways how it might work.

An expandable/collapsable "process tree" representation... could use
color coding or bold/italics/regular font to indicate processes which
have new output on stdout or stderr that the user might want to see.
Clicking on a particular process would show it's stderr & stdout text
inline, below it, in the tree.   It might hold onto the output from
finished processes for some configurable number of minutes after they
die.

The above could work either on one of the virtual terminals - say,
Alt-F2 or one of it's friends... or, potentially even use an X-Window
interface.

This has potential...  Thanks, Adrien, for the kick-in-the-pants I
needed on this!  Great idea for some open source contribution!
-pbr