Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:14 am Post subject: Re: To everyone who has been following this thread
pashoshington wrote:
My name is Aviah Morag, and I am the user who reported this bug. I posted this after the installer destroyed most of my hard drive twice. The circumstances in which it happened are rather uncommon, but it can easily happen to anyone who uses NeoOffice in Hebrew or Arabic.
First, thank you for finding the root cause of this bug. Without your troubleshooting, more people would have been affected by this horrible Apple bug.
I think the reason that so few people have experienced this bug is that the Apple bug causes NeoOffice to be installed as "/Contents". Since this looks like a plain old folder in Finder, I suspect most users affected by this bug couldn't find the NeoOffice application after installation and so just gave up. Fortunately, even running the patch, language pack, or help installers won't invoke the Apple bug since these installers won't look in the "/Contents" directory and will assume that NeoOffice is not installed.
Only when you have installed NeoOffice without the bug (i.e. with a different language setting) and then ran the patch, language pack, or help installers after relogging in with the language set to one of the affected languages will this bug occur.
In the NeoOffice 1.2.2, I have fixed this bug by forcing the installer to abort at the first moment that this bug is detected. If the bug is detected, users will see the following error message in the installer window a second or two after they input their administator name and password:
Code:
There were errors installing the software
Please try installing again.
This is a standard installer error because the Apple installer does not support custom error strings. This is not ideal, but at least it will prevent damage and we will have a workaround available i.e. relog in with English or other Western European language.
Note also that this bug does not exist in Mac OS X 10.4.x so only users of Mac OS X 10.3.9 will ever see the new error.
FWIW, there was a problem similar to this in one of the OOo 1.0.x installers I did a long time ago that was limited to /Applications, still bad. Due to circumstance, folks were still reporting experiencing the same nuking bug nearly a year after the installer was fixed due to people downloading stale links from mirrors.
This 'bug' made it into the OpenOffice 1.1.x code line too. It was very nasty.
I agree that if only one MORE person is affected, we failed to do our job properly. Sadly, this means the end of Neo/J 1.1.
I will do this today. I've been working through all the nitty gritty details of a release over the last 24 hours and I have another 8 - 10 hours of work to go .
I know that everyone wants immediate updates. But I'm not a big company with lots of workers to spring into action. It's just me and trying to "multi-task" means something gets screwed up.
IMHO, I've disabled downloads. That is the critical thing. Updates to the web site will get done in due time.
Patrick, I have no problem writing it up and submitting it to the trinity news, i just can't approve it. How about I put something together, and you can feel free to edit away.
-j, who is trying to NOT give more work to patrick
Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2006 1:34 pm Post subject: Re: www.planamesa.org will be offline
pluby wrote:
Huh? Do you think I have a direct line to Steve Jobs or something?
Ehr, no. You'd be funded a bit better in that case, I suppose.
Forgive my naivite, but I figured that a bug in the installer that can completely wipe someone's system (even if they are far away in the Middle East) would grab some attention from them..
Nothing meant as an offense, I assure you. I just figured they'd write you a note saying "thank you for reporting this nasty bug, we'll fix it for the next update and give you due credit."
I agree completely that taking down the binaries was the right thing to do.
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Does this bug only affect NeoOfficeJ or is NeoOffice 1.2 also affected? And does the bug only show up during installation?
My NeoOffice version is 1.2.1 Patch 0, according to "About NeoOffice." I am running OS 10.3.9. I recently downloaded and installed the language pack containing Hebrew and Arabic, so I am just wondering if I will have problems, or if the problems would have shown up already if I were going to have them. Is there anything I should be doing or looking out for?
Joined: Nov 28, 2005 Posts: 299 Location: Near Frankfurt/M. Germany
Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2006 2:35 am Post subject:
JCG, as the other postings of this thread show, the bug in question is an installer bug (APPLES installer, which is used by NeoOffice, has this bug). As your installation seems to have succeeded without erasing your HD, the bug may or may not be in your installer, but it didn't harm you (in fact, in all the time, NeoOffice uses Apples installer, only one person was harmed. The bug has consequences only under very rare circumstances as far as is known by now). On running Neo after installation, this critical bug we talk about here should not do any harm.
But nobody should do a fresh install of NeoOffice 1.2.1. or previous versions, as the installer is the same for older versions. Instead, for a fresh install, wait for NeoOffice 1.2.2, which will have a bug fix.
FYI. The NeoOffice download site is running again and NeoOffice 1.2.2 binaries (as well as a NeoOffice 1.2.2 "Patch 0") are now available. I will put out the announcements on the front page of this site and www.neooffice.org very shortly.
Also note that I have added a "Common Installation Problems" section to the download page for when users find that the installer aborts as a result of my fix for the Apple installer bug:
Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2006 6:58 am Post subject: Re: www.planamesa.org will be offline
pluby wrote:
Let's get real. Apple has never responded to my bugs in less than a year and when they do, it is usually a "we'll look at this" type of comment.
Are you referring to bug inserted through the Bug Reporter site?
If so, it's really strange since my bugs are usually read and taken in account. I can say this because in some occasions they replied to me asking for more information about the bug or if it was solved with the latest software release, and often they add a keyword (like [JavaJDK15], for example) to the title of the bug or mark the bug as duplicate.
Before you ask, I have a normal free online ADC subscription and no released products yet, so it doesn't seem they pay attention only to major software developers.
Yes I am talking about Apple's bug reporting system. In fact, just last week I got a reply to Apple bug 4140050 that for NeoOffice bug 802. I filed this Apple particular Apple bug 10 months ago with a test case that clearly showed that they broke Carbon font APIs in Tiger that worked fine in previous Mac OS X releases. What did the reply say? Essentially that they will look at it. Their response was unusually quick in this case compared to the many bugs I filed during the Mac OS X Developer Preview days when I was a developer at Sun. The average reply for those was no less than 2 years!
Which brings me to the point in my original posting. My point was that while filing a bug with Apple is nice, I cannot wait for Apple to fix it and must protect against its occurrence right now. Even if Apple fixed it immediately, I cannot assume that every 10.3.x user will install the update the Apple update that would have the fix. So, the first priority is to change the NeoOffice installer, not complain to Apple. Complaining to Apple (i.e. filing a bug) can wait until the first priority work is done.
Even if Apple fixed it immediately, I cannot assume that every 10.3.x user will install the update the Apple update that would have the fix. So, the first priority is to change the NeoOffice installer, not complain to Apple. Complaining to Apple (i.e. filing a bug) can wait until the first priority work is done.
You are absolutely right, it wasn't my intention to affirm the contrary.
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