Install Modules dialog crash

[David Serrano]

PixInsight can be reliably crashed by following this procedure:

- Move the config file out of the way (just to make sure this is a configuration issue).
- Go to the bin/ directory.
- Run "./PixInsight --no-splash --no-modules" (*).
- Go to Process > Modules > Install Modules.
- Since the default directory appearing in the dialog should be bin/, just click on the "Search" button.
- Click "Ok" on the dialog that says "26 modules were found".
- Click anywhere in the list of modules (a module name, a column header, the scroll bar). As soon as the mouse button is pressed, the crash dialog appears. The rest of the interface appears to work fine. You can also use <Tab> and <Shift><Tab> in order to give the focus to the list of modules.

Another less important bug:

- In the crash dialog, click on "Restart PixInsight". Now the splash screen appears and all modules are loaded, showing that this restart action ignored the user-specified command-line parameters.


* The --no-splash parameter isn't required, but helps to illustrate another point.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi David,

This bug has been fixed. It won't be present anymore in the new version 1.3, which is now in preparation for release.

The fix consists in that the Process > Install Modules and Process > Manage Modules actions are unavailable when the core application has been launched with modules disabled (i.e. with the --no-modules command line argument).

Thank you for detecting this important security gap.

In the crash dialog, click on "Restart PixInsight". Now the splash screen appears and all modules are loaded, showing that this restart action ignored the user-specified command-line parameters.

Note that by restarting the core application (through File > Restart) all command-line options are implicitly reset, that is, command-line options are only taken into account in the first execution of the core application. This is by design, and is not a security issue since the decision to restart the application is completely up to the user, and scripts and modules have no way to trigger the restart action --unless they have been given permission to execute command-line commands, but again this is up to the user (who is supposed to know what he/she is doing when he/she changes security settings!).