[scribus] Scribus Crashes due to Signal #6 (or #11)

[Bert Driehuis]

[apologies for the empty reply, my laptop mouse has a life of its own
and thought the Send button would be appropriate to its needs]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 3:19 PM, Charles Abbott
<charles at theatticpress.co.za> wrote:
> Hi,
> I run Scribus 1.5.2 on Linux Kubuntu 16.04
>
> Scribus crashes randomly with the message "Scribus Crashes due to Signal
> #6" (or Signal #11)
> This happens about once a day -- not much, but very irritating.
>
> If I restart Scribus it reopens with no problem and everything is fine,
> nothing out of place or deleted.
>
> I cannot identify any single keystroke or set of keystrokes that trigger
> the crashes.
>
> What does Signal #6 or #11 actually indicate?
>
> How can I fix this?

Usually, you have to be a programmer to fix either of them.

Signal 6 means "Abort", and is the end result of Scribus itself
deciding something is so wrong that aborting is the only safe option.
An abort may be shown in the output accompanied by a message that
explains what went wrong. You may be able to see the message if you
start Scribus from the command line.

Signal 11 means a Segmentation Violation, and is the result of a
programming error that results in memory being read or written that
does not exist or is protected.

Both can be tricky to diagnose, debug and fix. If the programmer is
lucky, the signal is generated right after the error was made, but
I've seen cases of both errors where the cause was far removed from
the place and time the error surfaced. And they are particularly tough
to disgnose if you can't figure out what action triggered is. On
Linux, you can configure the kernel to save a Core Dump if it happens,
which may help the developer track it down. Unfortunately, unless an
issue affects lots of users, tracking it down may be cost prohibitive.

If you do know what trigggered it (e.g. a specific document or a
specific action), you can file a bug report.


Hope this helps (or at least explains)!


Cheers,

Bert