[PyQt] Freezes and crashes with signal autoconnection

[Christian Roche]

Hi Phill, Hans,

thanks a lot for your answers.


Hans-Peter Jansen-2 wrote:
> 
> This does NOT qualify as a small piece of code, because:
>  - it's convoluted code (e.g. it's not obvious, which part runs threaded)
>  - you're doing hard to track things with QUrls (this is, where it
> crashes)
> 

Well let's say it was the smallest sample I was able to come up with, taking
into account the fact that I still do not clearly understand what's wrong
with the code and why or where precisely it crashes. So I'm basically going
blind here.


Hans-Peter Jansen-2 wrote:
> 
> Your clue stick is called gdb [...] eh voilà, your code crashes in the
> QUrl ctor. Easy, isn't it. This procedure
> should help you to isolate your issue. 
> 

Yes I was able to get similar results doing it slightly differently, I would
remove limits on coredumpsize in shell
> ulimit -c unlimited
then obtain a core.xyz corefile during the crash and debug it using
> gdb /usr/bin/python core.xyz
which would give me the same backtrace. However as Phil noted earlier it's
still difficult to see what's wrong here. In particular, all the print
statements I could add to my code to debug QUrl manipulation would always
indicate perfectly well-formed QUrl objects. There's something else going
wrong here, that has to do with the asynchronous garbage collection of
Python and C++ objects from what I understand, but here halts my insight.


Hans-Peter Jansen-2 wrote:
> 
> Doing silly things in Qt results in this behavior, and PyQt cannot not
> protect
> you here, while it adds some obstacles inherited from Python semantics
> (e.g. 
> lifetime issues). 
> 

Ok but what exaclty am I doing wrong ? From my point of view the intent is
clear: I manage some lists (QListView) of ImageLink that I want populated by
worker threads (QThread). So I launch QThreads that create and set up
ImageLink objects locally and then pass them over when ready to the main
thread using PyQt signals. All this seems reasonnable at first sight and the
documentation doesn't warn against doing that kind of things as much as I
can tell.

The first problem I encountered was due to the fact that the ImageLink
instance passed in the signal does not "contain" a reference to the original
ImageLink python object, so the latter could be GC'ed if the sending thread
ended before the signal was delivered. Hence the need to use the
Qt.BlockingQueuedConnection mode in this particular case, which solves the
problem.

However now I have another problem. Following Phill latest advice, I read
the following part of the documentation:


> In the current version QVariant.userType() will correctly return
> QMetaType.QObjectStar (or QMetaType.QWidgetStar) but an extra reference to
> the Python object is not kept. To avoid a potential crash you should
> ensure that you keep a separate reference to the Python object, either
> explicitly or implicitly by giving it a parent.
> 
Unfortunaltely these sentences are totally unclear to me. When is
QVariant.userType() used? Who does or does not keep a reference to the
Python object, and when? In which situation would a crash potentially occur?

Worse, eventhough I don't understand the "why", I tried to implement the
"how", i.e., naively added the following lines to my code, hoping to have
given my poor lonesome QObject some parent by doing so, and not any ordinary
parent, the parent of all parents, the very QApplication itself:


> class ImageLink(QObject):
> 
>     def __init__(self, base, url, href):
>         QObject.__init__(self)
>         app = QApplication.instance()
>         self.moveToThread(app.thread())
>         self.setParent(app)
>         blah blah
> 
Alas, poor Yorich, all this no no avail. Still it crashes faster than the
lightning, and grieves my sore heart and my tired soul.


Hans-Peter Jansen-2 wrote:
> 
> OTOH, it's a small price to pay for using the most efficient 
> and versatile toolkit out there with Python.
> 

Well far form me the idea of belitteling the quality of the Qt and/or PyQt
frameworks, I'm not an experienced programmer in general and definitely not
in the domain of GUIs. However I feel that eventhough the concept is
probably beautiful, the code is still evolving fast (read: still not mature)
and most of all the documentation is quite  succint.

In any case I still do not understand the damn issue, so as always... any
help greatly appreciated ! :-)
Chris
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