README

Crash Catcher is a utility library (libcrash) and application (crashcatcher32 /
crashcatcher64) that handles application crashes in a user- and developer-
friendly manner for Linux applications.

Normally when an application crashes, the signal causing the crash is printed
to the terminal (e.g. "Segmentation fault" or "Aborted") and the app is killed.
For a graphical environment like X11 using KDE/Gnome, or some other desktop
manager, applications are often run without a visible terminal, which makes it
appear as though the app unceremoniously quits for no reason. Though even if
the user ran it from a terminal, the given info is very minimal.

It is possible to do something about this by installing signal handlers to
watch for problems occuring, and these callbacks then do the work of collecting
any information available before showing the user an error message. However,
that's a non-simple solution (signal handlers are very limited in what they can
safely do), and is unfair to burden every application to handle indivually,
especially as other systems provide such functionality automatically.

Crash Catcher is designed to lift this burden, to provide a sharable library
that's as simple to use as possible while still providing useful capabilities.
It does not require tying your app to a hefty framework like KDE or GTK. All it
requires is a small library and application, and it will utilitize external
tools like kdialog, gxmessage, or xmessage (depending on what the user is
running), to display messages in a manner visually consistent with the rest of
the system. Beyond that, all an application has to do is link to libcrash, and
everything Just Works.

Additionally, an application does not have to explicitly link to libcrash.
Dynamically loading libcrash via dlopen will still work. Also, a user may set
the LD_PRELOAD environment variable or some other method to force libcrash to
load into existing applications (presuming said application doesn't set its own
signal handlers, in which case libcrash will effectively do nothing). This
means even existing applications can utilize it, so long as libcrash gets
loaded into them.

It is recommended to have GDB installed so that the crash catcher can attempt
to analyze the crashed process for potentially relevant information (loaded
libraries, stack traces, etc), although this is not required for simply
providing a visual acknowledgement of a crashed application.