Comment 5 for bug 1001035

I also find it the current lack of flexibility highly inconvenient. However, none of the alternatives proposed in the comments above really cut it as far as I'm concerned. Here is how I'd like to be able to set up our desktops (users' home directories are on network shares and have quota imposed on them):

* xsession-errors to a local filesystem, *not* to the home directory;

* automatic log rotation (some users hardly ever log out, there needs to be a way to keep the log file from growing without bound);

* support for multiple concurrent sessions by the same user, even on the same computer (e.g., VNC sessions, sessions with different display depths, etc.; other changes to lightdm may be needed to fully support this);

* log filtering and compression (to deal with buggy programs that output the same message in a loop; the latest incident here involved chromium-browser);

* timestamping of log entries.

Most of this would be easy if there was an option to pipe the output to an external program (e.g., /usr/bin/logger or some wrapper script around it). Make that configurable by the administrator and/or the user. LightDM could pass additional information as command line arguments or environment variables.