Issue 126846 - Analysis Task: Major Recurring Data/Operation Loss/Corruption Situations
Summary: Analysis Task: Major Recurring Data/Operation Loss/Corruption Situations
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: General
Classification: Code
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: 3.4.0
Hardware: All All
: P5 (lowest) Normal with 6 votes (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: AOO issues mailing list
QA Contact:
URL:
Keywords: crash, data_loss, performance, usability
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2016-02-16 18:32 UTC by orcmid
Modified: 2016-08-30 16:08 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: TASK
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---


Attachments
Analysis of Four General Cases (ODT file) (333.26 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2016-02-16 18:32 UTC, orcmid
no flags Details
Updated Analysis of Four General Cases (ODT file) (335.01 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2016-02-16 18:36 UTC, orcmid
no flags Details

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Description orcmid 2016-02-16 18:32:45 UTC
Created attachment 85291 [details]
Analysis of Four General Cases (ODT file)

This is a [meta-]meta-task.  The purpose is to provide focused attention on some recurring usability issues that involve crashing, data loss/corruption, or loss of operation (hangs, inability to start, problems with OpenOffice already running).

There are a variety of issues already and the idea is to provide meta-tasks for them and their analysis, mitigation, and repair.  Those will be connected into this task.

The inspiration for this issue is the attached contribution from Forum participant John Harvey, via Rory O'Farrell, that digs into four of these problem cases and provides some detailed explorations.  To address these farther, it is necessary to take those apart into separate investigation tasks.  

That will be done as part of further forensic tasks directed toward isolating the individual causes, which may be more than four on looking closer at the available reports that have accumulated over time.
Comment 1 orcmid 2016-02-16 18:36:45 UTC
Created attachment 85292 [details]
Updated Analysis of Four General Cases (ODT file)

This is a subsequent updating of the original document, this time delivered via DropBox, https://www.dropbox.com/s/slg7m8zosrr139m/Four%20user%20problems%20with%20Writer.odt?dl=0
Comment 2 orcmid 2016-02-17 03:39:07 UTC
Here's a proposal to stay focused and narrow on these and their immediate kin, because there will be much analysis required on just this class of problem.

We want to focus on the most constant and costly few reflected that the four cases reflect.

 1. Saved documents are opened later and found to be corrupted completely with their content unrecoverable altogether.

 2. There are crashes and freezes and stuck messages that require AOO to be shut down, losing whatever work that had been done.  Some features always fail hard because a prerequisite, such as Java, is not properly installed.

 3. There are situations where a document is reported as damaged, repair is offered, but the report won't go away and AOO can't be used, whether repair is accepted or declined.

 4. There are a few situations where suddenly writing aids or other features stop working or appear to be reset, spell-checker marking shows up on all text, etc.  These tend to be related to corruption of the User Profile but only complicated manual workarounds are effective.

It is easy to expand the scope. We want to narrow it rather than expand it so we can focus on what is likely to be a single defect case.  We may find that there are multiple defects with similar symptoms and have to then sort those out.

Also, we may have very simple mitigations and remedies that can be introduced in stages toward more complete solutions.  That is to avoid destabilizing the software with changes we introduce.  Changes must be reversible until we have confidence in them.
Comment 3 damjan 2016-02-17 13:16:53 UTC
The problems described here seem very dire and desperately need urgent further research and bug fixes ASAP...

At least the file corruption cases when saving should be completely preventable by saving to a temporary file, then atomically overwriting the original once saving is complete.

A lot of the file saving logic is in main/sfx2/source/doc, files like sfxbasemodel.cxx and objstor.cxx whose SfxObjectShell::SaveTo_Impl looks like a good place to start. It's long and convoluted code, probably best stepped through with a debugger.
Comment 4 John 2016-03-12 07:40:10 UTC
Thank you for raising this bug report.  

I wrote the attached document investigating these matters and if I can be of any assistance running test cases or answering questions I will be most happy to do so.

I run Windows 7 Home Edition 64 bit.
Comment 5 orcmid 2016-03-12 17:31:37 UTC
Issue 126869 has been created for focused analysis on the case of Lost/Corrupted Documents after Save/Shutdown.

There appear to be three cases that deserve to be split out further.

It will be useful to have review of defect reports and forum threads to provide further review and classification of severe data loss: either the document cannot be opened at all by ordinary means or the document file opens but all of the user's content has been lost. 

Please assist in refinement of these cases at Issue 126869.
Comment 6 orcmid 2016-03-12 18:00:13 UTC
(In reply to John from comment #4)
> Thank you for raising this bug report.  
> 
> I wrote the attached document investigating these matters and if I can be of
> any assistance running test cases or answering questions I will be most
> happy to do so.
> 
> I run Windows 7 Home Edition 64 bit.

Thanks John.  I only have Windows 10 64 bit for testing, so your use of Windows 7 is valuable.  (I think I can spin up Windows XP in a VM if needed.)

We can definitely use help in factoring out different cases that are piggy-backed together by reporters/responders because, from an external point of view, the consequences are the same: loss of usable document.
Comment 7 orcmid 2016-03-12 18:13:10 UTC
Issue 126768 is related to this category in an unusual manner.  The problem does not arise directly as the result of a Save from ApacheOpen Office, but the result is a persistent Read Error.  There is also a demonstrated crasher.

These arise in document interchange, so the document has not been lost, it has only become unusable to Apache OpenOffice.  Undesirable for interoperability but not so fatal as complete document loss.
Comment 8 orcmid 2016-05-15 17:09:48 UTC
(In reply to orcmid from comment #5)
> Issue 126869 has been created for focused analysis on the case of
> Lost/Corrupted Documents after Save/Shutdown.
> 
> There appear to be three cases that deserve to be split out further.
> 
> It will be useful to have review of defect reports and forum threads to
> provide further review and classification of severe data loss: either the
> document cannot be opened at all by ordinary means or the document file
> opens but all of the user's content has been lost. 
> 
> Please assist in refinement of these cases at Issue 126869.

A special case of images being lost from a document while it is being worked on (or possibly not noticed until re-opened) is another challenging case with analysis at Issue 126970.  This is separate from the full-loss/-corruption case that is the central factor in Issue 126869.
Comment 9 S9DD 2016-08-30 16:08:00 UTC
I have lost a number of files in the past two days, which appear to be related to the symptoms here.

Using 4.1.1 Win7 x64 
The PC suffered a crash - false positive anti-virus locked GUI reboot only option.
Upon reboot, loss of ALL files being edited in OpenOffice at the time, they are all corrupted.
No recovery is offered.
All files, when double-clicked in a directory, now come up with a page asking for the interpretation of characters and columns.  Continuing produces a file of # symbols in ODT files, and nothing could be done for the ODS files either.

A new JRE had been installed to fuel "Personal Brain" in the days to this point.  Not sure if this is related?

So, removed OO 4.1.1, and installed 4.1.2.

Problem is now WORSE.  Click in recent files, and pretty much all recently edited files are now not opening.  One reported a Generic I/O error.  Yet if I to the file in the specific directory, it opens OK.

Since this, opening more than one instance of Open Office produces similar issues.

My guess is possibly something is not being saved any more in the ODT and ODS files, to do with character sets.  Older files seem to open OK and are interpreted correctly.  

I also wonder if the latest JRE 32 is bugged.