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Crash through D-Bus calls

Friday, 6 April 2012 | Dominik Haumann


Years ago, there was a blog on the planet with the title “How to crash (almost) every Qt/KDE Application and how to fix it“. In short, if you are showing a dialog, KWin prevents you from closing the application by clicking on the close button in the window decoration. However, through D-Bus, you can still quit the application. A solution was also provided: Use a guarded pointer to create the dialog.While this fixes the issue, it looks like fixing the blame, and not the real issue. Stricktly speaking, even the Qt documentation would be wrong then.

Searching for ‘Accepted’ on lxr.kde.org shows lots of dialogs that lead to possible crashes. I wonder whether developers are really aware of this crash? Even if we took care of this issue as proposed, it’s just a matter of time until dialogs are created the `wrong’ way again (do we have krazy checks for that?). In Kate, no one took care of this situation, meaning that you can indeed crash the application through D-Bus.

Is there a better way to fix this?

Tags:  planet

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