Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 96595
cannot save-to a location with a dead, outdated, unconnected lockfile
Last modified: 2017-05-20 10:55:52 UTC
- open an arbitrary text document, let's name it doc.odt => besides doc.odt, a hidden lock file ".~lock.doc.odt#" is created - do something which lets OOo crash :), or simply kill it - delete doc.odt from your disc - start OOo - create a new text document - save it as doc.odt, to the very same location as the original doc.odt => the document is not saved, instead an error message pops up saying Error saving document ...: Object not accessible. The object cannot be accessed due to insufficient user rights. There are at least two problems with this: First, of course when I save a file which previously did not exist, the OOo should simply ignore the existing lock file, since it's obviously out-of-date, and not connected to the file which I'm just going to write. Second, if this is not easily possible (though I strongly think OOo should *not* behave this way), then the error message needs to be improved. At least, OOo should tell the user that there is a problem with the file lock. It took me *days* to find out why the heck OOo refused to save a document to "doc.odt" here ...
When office crashes, it tries to remove the lock file. The probability of the scenario when the crash handling is not able to remove the lock file is very small, although of course it is possible in case the crash handling itself crashes or can not be activated. The killing of the process is a different story, we have no handler for this case, so the lock file is not removed. The same problem with the lock file happens when the network connection is suddenly broken and the document is closed during the outage. From my point of view even if there is no document with the specified name, we can not just remove the lock file from another user in reliable manner. The problem is that it is possible that another user creates the file exactly at the same point of time. Timestamp based solution looks for me to unreliable in network environment. So currently I see only a UI improvement possibility for this case.
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".