Frank Meies wrote:
there is a bug and I can understand that this is pretty annoying for
you. But let me explain my point of view:
1. This is no regression, this bug exists from the beginning of time.
2. You are the first (and only one) ever to report this bug
3. The fix for this is not trivial
Be assured: This bug has been given a lot of attention. It took me quite
some time debugging the code and analyzing the root cause of the crash.
My conclusion is: There are plenty of other bugs which have a higher
priority than this one.
Well, I understand your arguments but I'd like to put some comments for
them:
1. Even though it's not regression, it's still a crash - which means the
user looses (!) the work he's being doing since last save. Autosave on
crash does not work here - it crashes again when it tries to save the
document, which is even worse because on OOo restart it asks me if I
want to restore saved document but I know it wasn't properly saved so I
can even loose my original document if I agreed and then saved. If you
had other documents open and unsaved they will be lost too. Most of the
time OOo crashes on document close but sometimes it crashes on other
actions, like style manipulation etc which makes it not quite predictable.
It's very easy to create "offending" document so it's easy for somebody
to send this kind of document over the net to crash the OOo, not exactly
exploit but still user may end up with lost information. So basically
every time I open document from somebody else I have to make sure I save
all my open work.
This is buffer overflow, can I be sure it can't be exploited to make
something more malicious than just a crash?
2. I may be the first one to report but it does not necessary means I am
the only one which have seen this. I was working with one document for a
year and OOo started to crash about 6 month before I've found out what
the problem was. At some point I edited content.xml (as OOo find/replace
does not work nicely with styles) so I thought I introduced it somehow.
My document was ~2500 pages long, where save takes about 5-6 min so I
wasn't pressing save button very often. You can imagine my frustration
if my last 15-20 min of my work were just gone. It wasn't until I
started to create smaller docs and saw this problem that I filed a bug.
Currently I actively work with about 10 documents 7 out of which have
this crash as I use styles everywhere. So I have to be very careful when
working. I have 10-15 coolegues which are less technical-savvy so I have
to convert the docs to MS Office format and back when I work with them.
Needless to say they won't switch to OOo if they have to deal with
crashes. I also can't publish these documents on the net for the same
very reason.
3. There's no simple workaround for this problem for the user. After a
year of observing the crashes and experimenting I've found some ways to
work with these documents. But that is not quite a workaround as you
constantly have to remember about the problem and you can't efficently
exchange the document with others. Over the last year I've filed some
other bugs and suggestions and even though only one has been fixed, it
is ok with me as they either not very visible or have some reasonable
workarounds (e.g. export to XHTML crashes but I can use content.xml with
some sed'ding). This one though IMHO is just not tolerable for the
project like OOo.
Thanks,
Andriy
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