Re: Applications routinely crash X... how is this possible?

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Tod Liebeck wrote:
> I've had instances where the Gimp (1.0.1 and cvs 1.1.2) and older
> versions of Gnome Midnight Commander could crash X-Windows (Miguel
> quickly fixed the GMC problem).  I'm very unfamiliar with the innards of
> X and GTK+, but I find it odd that things are set up in such a way that
> these applications can crash the X Window System.  
>

In general it is an X bug if X crashes, just as it's always a kernel bug
if Linux crashes, no matter what the applications were doing (assuming
they are userspace apps). This is sort of a weird case since X doesn't
crash it just gets stuck blocking.
 
> What happens in the particular instances I'm talking about is an
> application crashes and displays a prompt to the shell that ran X.  For
>
... 
> I'd like to know if anyone knows where the root of this problem lies...
> X-Windows?, GTK+?, Gnome?... something screwy on my system?  
> 

It is just a bug, which is hopefully fixed now. At least I'm fairly sure I
saw the fix go by on the CVS commits list. It isn't symptomatic of
anything deeper.

Havoc