Bug 53858

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.