Disk full phenomena

[Ray Olsen]

Hi Kde developers

I have started having a weird experience using Kpat and running the 
Forty & Eight game.  There is an existing Linux problem (at least ten 
years old) that clouds the issue, so I am looking for some information.

I am using a desktop with:
     AsRock H470M-ITX/ac
     I3-10100 Intel processor
     8MB memory
     NVME HDD 256GB (126GB partition)
     Ubuntu Mate 20.04.2 LTS
     KDE game Package

After playing several hands of  Forty & Eight I got a message that I was 
low on HDD space.  So I looked in my Home directory,  and found two 
hidden files, each one having multiple gigabytes of data:

     .xsession-errors
     .xsession-errors.old

I read some linux stuff and learned that the linux folks have allowed 
applications folks to set up an error text file and then redirect that 
data to a system file that houses error messages.  I believe what they 
told me is that other applications can also redirct stuff to the same 
hidden file in my home directory.  I see that in my /$HOME/etc/x11 
directory there is a script which accomplishes this redirection 
(Xsession), I think at login.  In the same script it will trim the file 
to 500000 to prevent it from getting too big. However, I think this trim 
only happens at login. YIKES!!!

Conceptually, there should not be a lot of errors and this file 
shouldn't get very big.  So I looked at the data and found many, many 
lines of text that look like something I would print  if I were 
debugging the program.  But I would not leave that posting in for a 
released version of the game,  and yet, there it is.

In the process of looking for help on the Internet, I found many 
reported problems of people getting full disk warnings, going as far 
back as 2009.  It appears the linux keepers have not found a suitable 
way to exorcise this dilemma. I bring this up because my kpat problem is 
embedded with the root problem of filling the HDD. Sometimes a two step 
problem confuses the fixing of each of the steps.

I am hoping someone will look at the symptoms I have sent, and convince 
the author of Forty and Eight that removing the output that is filling 
the error log would be a good thing.

Thank you for listening

Ray Olsen
risingstar at imaxmail.net
nestled in the beautiful mountains of northern Idaho