Current gimp (1.1.21) seems to have problems with recovering from any plugin that dies. Things start going wrong when it takes a SIGPIPE while trying to write(read?) to the pipe to the plugin which is dead. Rather than ignoring SIGPIPE, and collecting an EPIPE from the io operation and using this to trigger dead plugin cleanup operations, gimp currently treats SIGPIPE just like any other signal: it's fatal. Unfortunately, while attempting to print out some error message or other, gimp causes a segfault. This might be due to non-reentrant stdio libraries in use, I don't know. According to POSIX, the only thing you're allowed to do is read or write variables of type sigatomic_t. Calling libc funcitions (including printf()) sounds like a recipe for disaster, especially with a non-reentrant libc. This needs some more thought, and I don't have much time right now to look into any more. I'm pretty sure that plugins were correctly cleaned up on their unexpected termination at some earlier stage. The whole point of plugins being separate processes is that a plugin should be unable to cause the main gimp app to crash: if they can then this is a fairly critical bug that should be fixed. Austin
