Regular crashes (segfault) when running LaTeX

[thobl]

I had this issue for quite some time now that Ipe crashes with a segfault more or less randomly (on average maybe every two hours or so). I so far did not write a bug-report as it was hard to pinpoint as I have no way of reproducing it. But now I have a workaround that should probably give a strong hint on where the problem lies: since adding prefs.freeze_in_latex = true to my settings a month ago, I did not have a single crash. Also colleagues of mine confirm that they also did not have crashes since adding this line.

Here are some additional observations that led me to this setting while looking through the lua code running Latex. I would guess that it is some kind of race condition happening when Latex takes too long to compile.

• the crashes usually (only?) happened when running Latex
• disabling running Latex automatically made the crashes less likely
• it never crashed on me when creating figures for papers, only when creating slides (which have way more labels to compile)
• changing how my window manager handles opening an external editor reduced the number of crashes notably
• sometimes when Ipe crashed quickly after editing text with emacs as external editor, it would also crash the whole emacs-instance

I am using Ipe version 7.2.30 (but others and myself also experienced the same behavior on other versions).