Opened 19 months ago

Closed 18 months ago

#14965 closed defect (limitation)

Windowsize typo crashes ChimeraX.

Reported by: ecrofut@… Owned by: Tom Goddard
Priority: normal Milestone:
Component: UI Version:
Keywords: Cc:
Blocked By: Blocking:
Notify when closed: Platform: all
Project: ChimeraX

Description 

Hello,

I am Ethan Crofut and I am a researcher using ChimeraX. I made a typo and
executed "windowsize 850850" which caused the program to crash immediately,
and attempts to reopen ChimeraX failed. I had to reinstall the program. I
was using version 1.6.1, I am not sure if this has been addressed in 1.7.

Thanks,
Ethan

Change History (2)

comment:1 by pett, 18 months ago

Component: Unassigned → UI
Owner: set to Tom Goddard
Platform: → all
Project: → ChimeraX
Status: new → assigned

comment:2 by Tom Goddard, 18 months ago

Resolution: → limitation
Status: assigned → closed

Thanks for reporting the problem. I tried "windowsize 850850" on Mac with ChimeraX 1.8 daily build and it also crashed in the Qt window toolkit. I would expect the Qt window toolkit to just reject sizes that are too large, but apparently they do not. I had no trouble restarting ChimeraX. I guess you might have had trouble restarting ChimeraX if it saved the huge window size in preferences and then tried to start the next ChimeraX session using the same size. It did not do that for me.

While we could put in some code to protect against this, there are many ChimeraX commands where you can enter sizes that may cause a crash due to out-of-memory conditions. I don't think we can protect the user against these many situations. So I don't plan put in code to deal with this. The Qt window toolkit should do that -- only it knows the actual limit, and of course it should not crash if that is exceeded.

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