[kde-linux] Re: bizarre error message in KDE-4.6

[Duncan]

James Tyrer posted on Sun, 20 Feb 2011 17:03:39 -0700 as excerpted:

> When ever I open KDE apps in a Konsole, I get this error message:
> 
> realPath called with a relative path 'etc/kde-4.4/xdg/pixmaps/', please
> fix realPath called with a relative path 'etc/kde-4.4/xdg/icons/',
> please fix
> 
> OK, so I would like to fix it, but where is the problem?
> 
> Google was no help.

This is only a semi-educated guess...

I'd guess that those paths originate from an incorrectly set path var (not 
necessarily THE $PATH var...) at kde (or possibly qt) build-time.  Play 
around with the kde4-config command and see if any of the paths it lists 
match the ones above.  (Using --help here, looks like --types, followed by 
--path <type> should be useful, for types of icon, pixmap, xdgdata-icon 
and xdgdata-pixmap.)

Meanwhile...  at least here, most kde apps spew a whole lot of complaints 
when run with STDERR/STDOUT set to something I see (like when running from 
a konsole window), but they seem to work fine.  I've concluded that in 
general they're very verbose about such things primarily for developer use 
and occasional troubleshooting, precisely /because/ they're GUI apps that 
most "lusers" won't ever run from a konsole or with STDOUT/STDERR logged, 
so they /can/ and they take full advantage of it.  IOW, I don't worry too 
much about it /unless/ I have something to troubleshoot, since it's pretty 
routine for them to spit out several pages of complaints about all sorts 
of stuff when run from the konsole, yet still work just fine.

Of course, the problem then occurs when there /is/ a problem, since 
there's so much "harmless noise" output, it's difficult to figure out what 
might be worth investigating to try and fix the problem, and what's simply 
(normally) harmless noise, but now obscuring whatever errors I'm actually 
hoping to find in that output.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman