Any programmer accustomed to writing programs on Linux or System
V-type Unixes will have encountered the program variously known as
strace or truss, which monitors another program and produces a
detailed log of every system call the program makes - in other
words, all the program's interactions with the OS kernel. This is
often an invaluable debugging tool, and almost as good an educational
one.
When it's a GUI program (or rather, the GUI-related behaviour of
a program) that you want to understand or debug, though, the level
of interaction with the OS kernel is rarely the most useful one.
More helpfully, one would like to log all the program's interactions
with the X server in the same way.
This package provides xtruss, an X protocol loggers. It has a
command-line syntax similar to strace in its default mode, you just
prefix "xtruss" to the same command line you would have run anyway
and its output format is also more like strace, putting requests
and responses on the same line of output where reasonably possible.
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