Sigil 0.8.5 Random Crashes

[SuicycoMania]

Yesterday, I downloaded, and installed the new 0.8.5 (64-bit Windows) version of Sigil (upgrading from v0.8.4). Ever since I upgraded, I am getting random crashes when deleting items from the "Text" section.

Does not happen all the time. It is a completely random thing. I can even go back in to Sigil after a crash, and try and delete the same item, and be successful. So I know it is not a specific item.

Does not seem to be an overall file size issue. I have tried on an EPUB file over 5 MB and also on one than was less than 400 KB. It eventually will crash.

Does not matter if it is one item or many items that I try and delete. It has crashed when trying to delete one item, and it has crashed when trying to delete several items at once.

The main actions I use are (if that helps any):
"Delete Unused Media Files"
"Delete Unused Stylesheet Classes"
"Validate EPUB with FlightCrew"
But the crashes only occur when I try and delete an item from the "Text" section.

So, right now... I either go back to 0.8.4 or continue to do a Save after each action I do so as not to lose what I have done.

Anyone else experiencing this issue?

[KevinH]

Hi,

That is very strange. Nothing we touched since Sigil 0.8.4 has anything to do with deleting items. So perhaps there is a conflict of some sort with some other software on your machine. You might also want to try removing your Sigil Settings file and regenerating them.

If you can ever get something to repeat, I would be happy to try and track down the problem. Can you enable in any way the equivalent of a crash report? This happens automatically with each crash on a Mac but I am unsure how this is enabled in Windows.

Hopefully someone else of Windows will be seeing the same thing and we can figure out what might be going on.

Also, which mode are you using Sigil in? For example is your Preview pane showing? Are you working in CodeView or BookView mode? Do you have one of the files that you delete open in a Tab when you do the delete? If so, does it matter if it is the front tab or not?

Thanks!

KevinH

[theducks]

Sigil 8.5 on W7 x64

• Deleted half a dozen (various books) files from the Text group
• Done Merges
• made (NCX) TOC
• Cleaned the CSS
• cleaned extra media

not even an unusual screen blink

Maybe it is interacting (poorly) with you A/V?
Are your books on a NAS or networked drive?

[KevinH]

Hi,

I was unable to recreate this with my own build from Sigil master. So I downloaded an official build for Mac OS X and grabbed an epub with a huge number of chapters and started deleting them left and right, in Preview, without Preview, in BookView, in CodeView. Kept repeating until only 1 chapter left. Then reloaded the epub and repeated it all. I did this 10 times in a row. I could not even get a hiccup out of it. No crashes of any sort.

So if this is a problem, it must be either Windows specific or specific to your own set-up.

Surely, there must be a way to get some type of crash report or crash dump on Windows? Perhaps some kind soul here will explain how it is done.

There are also programs that can check your system for issues and problems. Some of the other crashing related threads in Sigil list them. Perhaps they may shed some light.

Sorry I can't be more help here. I hate crashes and I am trying to track them all down and get them squashed as soon as possible, so any hints into how it is caused would be welcome.

Take care,

KevinH

[KevinH]

Hi SuicycoMania,

Any further information?

KevinH

[Camelot]

Confirmed various crashed, but i cannot reproduced this.
the lasted two crash i deleted manual one html file in Book View.

OS: aptosid 64bit
Sigil version 0.8.5 from DiapDealer.

Edit:
The books are from amazon and convert with calibre to epub.
The name of the file is:

part0004.html
part0005_split_000.html
part0005_split_001.html
part0006_split_000.html
part0006_split_001.html
part0007_split_000.html
part0007_split_001.html

another curios — not reproduced — bug:
Sigil forget/killed a splitting html file.

split one html then rename all file and save.
reopen epub, the splitting html missing in Book browser and content.opf.

[KevinH]

Hi Camelot,

So this is a Linux version you are having problems with? No one has reported any problems on Linux. Do you have a system Qt also installed on your system? If so what version is it?
Are you sure you are running Sigil 0.8.5?

KevinH

[KevinH]

Hi,

Fired up my Linux Mint 17.1 64 bit running in a Virtual Machine on my Mac. Grabbed the latest .deb package from DiapDealer and it installed and ran flawlessly. I could *not* get it to crash doing huge number of random deletes from the Text browser window.

I simply can not recreate your crash at all.

Please verify you have run the sigil script to properly launch Sigil which is installed in /usr/local/bin/ on my machine. This script is needed to properly set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to prevent conflicts with Qt 5.4 needed by Sigil and system level Qt versions.

Note that libxml2 is used by Qt 5.4 but not statically linked. So there may also be older versions of libxml2 on your system that are causing a problem. Please check which versions of libxml2 exists on your system and where they are located. Certain older version of libxml2 are badly broken.

Hope this helps you track down the issue.

KevinH

[DiapDealer]

I also have an alternate Windows version of 0.8.5. It's not entirely the same as the official Windows Sigil package, so I would prefer that issues involving it be posted in its own thread (same with the Linux binary packages). My binaries are completely unofficial. Any weird behavior with them could very well be something I did wrong when creating them.

So please... if you're experiencing issues using one of my unofficial binary packages, report those issues in the thread for that package. If I (or anyone) can reproduce the issues in an officially supported build of Sigil, then the appropriate action can be taken. Until then, remember that they're unofficial for a reason.

[Camelot]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Do you have a system Qt also installed on your system?

libqtcore 4 4.8.6 and another qt4 packages, but not Qt 5x.

Sigil can start only from sigil script, i don't have installed Qt 5.

Originally Posted by KevinH

Are you sure you are running Sigil 0.8.5?

Yes…

Originally Posted by KevinH

Please check which versions of libxml2 exists on your system and where they are located.

I have libxml2 v2.9.2 (my system is aptosid based on Debian unstable)

Originally Posted by KevinH

Certain older version of libxml2 are badly broken.

I know https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=255887

@ DiapDealer
All right

[KevinH]

Hi Camelot,

Are you familiar with gdb and are you willing to try running Sigil from inside gdb to generate a crash report.

Simply edit (as root or sudo) /usr/local/bin/sigil and change this line:

 exec /usr/local/share/sigil/sigil-real "$@"

to be (assuming you have gdb installed in /usr/bin)

 exec /usr/bin/gdb /usr/local/share/sigil/sigil-real "$@"

Then fire up sigil as normal and at the gdb prompt enter:

 run

When it crashes, gdb will appear and use the following to generate a backtrace:

 bt

and copy and paste it here. When done, enter

 quit

to exit gdb.

Alternatively, you should be able to enable crash (core) dumps on your system by doing the following before starting up sigil.

ulimit -c unlimited

Getting a backtrace via gdb from a crash dump (core file) would at least give us some idea of where to start looking.

Thanks,

KevinH

[Camelot]

Thanks KevinH,

I will try this, but I can not reproduce (tested on 10 books).

[eschwartz]

Kevin, any good reason not to simply start sigil via "gdb sigil"?

Modifying system files as root to hardcode one-time uses of e.g. gdb is not the recommended way to go about doing things...

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Kevin, any good reason not to simply start sigil via "gdb sigil"?

Because "sigil" isn't a debuggable binary file. It's a bash script. It sets the necessary environment before executing the sigil-real binary. And calling "gdb sigil-real" will likely fail without the environment being set.

Modifying system files as root to hardcode one-time uses of e.g. gdb is not the recommended way to go about doing things...

Maybe not. but necessity is the mother of invention. Still, you have a point. One could always cd to /usr/local/share/sigil and then attach gdb to the sigil-real binary by doing something like:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/share/sigil SIGIL_PLUGIN_LAUNCHERS=/usr/local/share/sigil/plugin_launchers gdb ./sigil-real

Then:

run

But if I'm the one going to be doing lots of Sigil debugging ... I'm going to temporarily edit that launch script and put it back when I'm done (or create a new gdb launch script in my home directory if sudo is an issue)

[KevinH]

Hi,
I did not think gdb liked running on scripts. In the old days it would not have with a script that used exec as Sigil's does. I remember we used to add a --debug options for launchscripts for OpenOffice.org to properly run gdb with the proper LD_LiIBRARY_PATH and other environment vars set. Does gdb now handle scripts that use exec directly on the command line and do the right thing?

KevinH