Crash on Export Reconstruction

Q&A
#1

Hi all

I’m getting another crash from GPlates, this time while trying to export reconstructions. The program crashes immediately after clicking Reconstruction → Export with the following error dialog:

Screenshot from 2021-02-23 15-40-19
Screenshot from 2021-02-23 15-40-191920×1080 213 KB

So far I’ve tested it with a variety of different sets of data, including no data, and the error happens every single time. Here’s a couple of stack traces: GPlates crash on Export Raster · GitHub

Is there a development version of GPlates available for testing, such as the Git development branch or similar? I’ve had a huge number of issues with the Qt5 port as compared to the previous Qt4 version, but I can no longer install any Qt4 applications due to dependency issues. I’m happy to test various features as I’m not using GPlates for important research or time-critical projects.

kind regards,
Robbie

#2

Hi Robbie,

It looks like the time increment in the export animation is zero somehow, which is a bit odd because the lowest value it is allowed is 0.0001 (in that if you try to set is lower in the dialog it just clamps to 0.0001), so I’m not sure how it’s possible that’s it’s zero.

What is your Step size in Edit > Preferences ? …

image
image767×346 12 KB

Not yet, but there are plans to move to Git. Actually the code that you’re currently compiling is pretty much the latest development main branch.

Is that with other applications or GPlates?

Regards,
John

#3

Hi John,

Setting the step size to 1.0000 My fixed the issue. Changing the step size back to zero limits it to 0.0001 as you said, and the crash doesn’t occur. If I delete my GPlates settings in ~/.config/GPlates then the crash occurs, so the default seems to be set at zero on the first program run. When I encountered the previous crash, I had deleted my GPlates configuration to ensure it was a fresh run in case there were any legacy incompatibilities.

Is that with other applications or GPlates?

Just GPlates. My desktop environment is GNOME so I don’t use many other Qt applications.

kind regards,
Robbie

#4

Hi Robbie,

Thanks for that info, very helpful, and enabled me to fix the bug in GPlates.

Turned out the default values were not getting properly initialised (due to a bug introduced just before GPlates 2.2) and so they all became zero.

In your case, when you removed your non-default settings (~/.config/GPlates/GPlates.conf), you got a zero value for the default time increment. And hence the crash. When you then changed it to 1.0 in the user preferences, that set the value in a new ~/.config/GPlates/GPlates.conf, preventing further crashes.

I’ve uploaded a fix in the source code link you used (the link mentioned in this post). It’s the same download link but with updated source code. The only changed files are src/app-logic/UserPreferences.cc and src/app-logic/UserPreferences.h (so you can just replace those two files for a quicker build).

Regards,
John