Comment 8 for bug 382879

>Not sure why would anybody want to change the log names

If you re-read my original bug report, you'll see that we're more interested in changing the path of the file than its name. GDM, like most GNOME products, assumes that all home directories are stored on local disk and that processes running as root will have full access to user's home directories. This is of course not true in any environment that uses network filesystems for home directories. As a result, GDM tries to display the ~/.xsession-errors to a user, and can't. If the path of the file could be changed to, e.g., /tmp, then GDM would have no problem displaying it.