Bug 53857

Summary: knotify shouldn't handle it's own crashes to prevent recursion
Product: [Frameworks and Libraries] kdelibs Reporter: mark
Component: knotifyAssignee: Carsten Pfeiffer <pfeiffer>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: crash    
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Debian testing   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Attachments: backtrace of knotify crash for bug 53587

Description mark 2003-02-01 21:37:19 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.1)
Installed from:    Debian stable Packages
OS:          Linux

Hello

The Debian PPC packages I installed recently were missing the "libx11globalcomm.la" file. I realize this is not a bug in KDE, but in the packaging. The bug I'm reporting is what resulted from this situation: 

The missing file caused applications like noatun to crash. This caused Knotify to be triggered, but knotify depended on the file, too, so knotify crashed recursively. Left unattended, this eventually disabled our computer due all the memory being filled with knotify processes. Then a system reboot was necessary. (We started booting KDE and then went to make dinner...) 

It seems like a bug in KDE that knotify calls itself when it crashes, because this can happen recursively. Either the recursion should be detected and prevented, or crashes of knotify should be handled some other way. It looks like there have been other cases that caused this:

http://bugs.kde.org/simple_search.cgi?id=knotify+crash+often

Since this still happening, I assume those other bugs were resolved by fixing whatever caused knotify to crash in the first place, not by solving the problem of it crashing recursively in a general way. 

To reproduce: move aside libx11globalcomm.la, or another file that knotify needs, then run knotify.
Comment 1 Carsten Pfeiffer 2003-02-01 22:24:49 UTC 
*** Bug 53858 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 2 Carsten Pfeiffer 2003-02-02 04:18:15 UTC 
Subject: kdelibs/arts/knotify

CVS commit by pfeiffer: 

- try to detect crashes and offer to disable arts output in that case
prevents infinite knotify spawning and crash handlers

CCMAIL: 53857-close@bugs.kde.org


  M +87 -7     knotify.cpp   1.69
  M +1 -3      knotify.h   1.22
Comment 3 mark 2003-02-02 04:18:34 UTC 
Subject: Please confirm your message re:  knotify shouldn't
 handle it's own crashes to prevent recursion         

This is an automatically generated response to your message.  I'm
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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53857     
carpdjih@mailbox.tu-berlin.de changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |FIXED



------- Additional Comments From carpdjih@mailbox.tu-berlin.de  2003-02-02 04:18 -------
Subject: kdelibs/arts/knotify

CVS commit by pfeiffer: 

- try to detect crashes and offer to disable arts output in that case
prevents infinite knotify spawning and crash handlers

CCMAIL: 53857-close@bugs.kde.org


  M +87 -7     knotify.cpp   1.69
  M +1 -3      knotify.h   1.22
Comment 4 Matt Boban 2008-06-04 00:06:25 UTC 
Created attachment 25099 [details]
backtrace of knotify crash for bug 53587
Comment 5 Matt Boban 2008-06-04 00:07:26 UTC 
This just happened to me...I'm not sure what caused the initial crash, but restarting the computer did not help with the recursive popups. Had to create a new user profile. Attached the bactrace.