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[Aisano <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is somewhat discomforting that an error in gnusound terminates the
Gnome session. I looked into this and found that gnusound defines an
elaborate signal handler, probably with the intention to save as much of
the user's ongoing work as possible. The code is contained in the
"emergency.c" module.

Now the last statement in the "emergency_sighandler" function is a
"kill(0, original_signo)". This propagates the caught signal to all
processes in the same process group. A "ps -ej" command shows that all
processes started through a Gnome menu or a Gnome launcher share the
same process group, whose number is the process id of the "gnome-
session" process. So when gnusound crashes from a SIGABRT (as in the
present case) this signal is propagated to the Gnome session, which
accordingly terminates.

Presently I neither understand why all processes launched by Gnome share
a process group nor why gnusound propagates signals to the whole process
group. The combination of these two facts is certainly fatal and
undesirable. Somebody who understands this better than I presently do
might make a separate bug out of this.

-- 
gnusound crashes X session immediately on launch (Affects Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/282939
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