Who is "most people"? Windows?
I was thinking Ubuntu would be enough, as a majority of the people using the devcoin-qt client are doing so on Ubuntu. I was not able to install wxWidgets in June, but installing under Ubuntu is supposed to be doable:
http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Installing_and_configuring_under_UbuntuWe should nail down exactly what is causing the crash. We already got rid of what was causing it before, which was mining.
So what the heck is causing it now?
What was mining doing that caused it? Was it just that mining uses threads?
This error looks as if threads are happening even without mining. Maybe the patches explicitly set up threads themselves?
I don't understand what the patches are doing, but I speculate that indeed the patches must be setting up threads themselves. I would speculate that there should be a way to just check without setting up more threads, but I don't know how to do that. If there are no objections, they'll be an twelve generation share bounty to check in some way that doesn't crash a Qt client, divided by everyone who codes it. I know that won't magically fix the problem and I don't know if the problem can be fixed, but if it can it'll give the developers who fix it some of what they deserve.
I am not really clear as to whether our previous solution (simply not trying to mine) worked due to eliminating the use of threads or due to eliminating of whatever it was that was not thread-safe.
I believe our previous problem was that the Qt threads were incompatible with threads made by other programs. When we tried calling a python script from within Qt it crashed; when we tried running a python script and then reading the result from a file, that worked fine.
Is the GUI simply trying to pretend to be both a front end GUI and a back end daemon by running a GUI thread and a daemon thread? If so maybe we could/should rip out the GUI from the deamon and have the GUI totally separate, like any normal unix application that provides a GUI front end to interact with a daemon?
That might be approaching close toward being a thin client, maybe we can look around and find a thin client people who want a GUI can use to talk to the daemon?
OH WAIT! Open Transactions' java client includes a tab in which you talk to your bitcoin daemon.
I suspect that bitcoin-qt wraps tightly with the network code. If someone does make a thin GUI client which communicates securely with the daemon, that would be good too.
I don't recall exactly what problems I had to solve to get the wxWidgets bitcoin to compile, I do recall it was a pain, and took a while. I was given the impression that on normal systems, which maybe meant Windows, Mac and some kind of Linux, maybe Ubuntu or Debian or both, it "just works", that it didn't work on Fedora was my fault for using Fedora instead of the target platform. What platform did you try it on?
I tried it under Ubuntu, and I could not get it to compile. I'm hoping that either the wxWidgets package has improved, or that someone else could make a devcoin-wxWidgets binary and I could run that.