Comment 58 for bug 60448

I just came across this bug report after finally tracking down my own disk space issues to .xsession-errors.old. The file had grown to over 13 GB!

Obviously, most users are not affected by this bug, so it seems to be triggered by excessive error reporting somewhere else. In my case, the most common error is this, repeated over and over and over:

(gnome-power-manager:2073): Gtk-WARNING **: A floating object was finalized. This means that someone
called g_object_unref() on an object that had only a floating
reference; the initial floating reference is not owned by anyone
and must be removed with g_object_ref_sink().

I understand that's not really helpful for tracking down the source of the error, but the redundancy of the errors got me thinking. At least on my system (10.10, 64-bit), old errors are occasionally moved from .xsession-errors to .xsession-errors.old, and the latter file is the one that soaks up all the disk space. Others have suggested modifying the code to prune the logs occasionally. That should eliminate the problem entirely, but it hasn't been done. If there's a reason that cannot be done, maybe the error redundancy could be exploited using compression?