BUG - NeoOffice Presentation - Crashes during copy/paste

ChuckAmata · Blue Pill Joined: Aug 14, 2009 Posts: 3

When copying slides or copying and/or pasting objects and/or object groups between or within slides, Neo-office occasionally crashes. Operation generally proceeds normally if a program save is performed just prior to the operation or immediately after a restart/recovery. The fact that the crashes are totally random and not related to a specific object seems to indicate a memory leak, stack, or pointer reference problem. Other telltale signs:

1. Object on slide or part of slide master dissapears (close & reopen brings them back) just prior to crash event
2. Screen repaint fragments begin appearing when objects are repositioned on the slide (hieroglyphics left on screen)
3. The file I am creating has 9 master slides and 60 slides so far. Each slide has 20-150 objects (i.e. text, boxes, circles, etc - many in groups of 3 or more)
4. Unfortunately, the material I am working on is confidential or I would attach the file
4. Version 3.0 Patch 7

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

Can you attach a crashlog using the "Option B" instructions in this NeoWiki article?

There are instructions on how to attach a file to a post in this forum post.

--fran

ChuckAmata · Blue Pill Joined: Aug 14, 2009 Posts: 3

Problem Details:

Process: soffice.bin [3711]
Path: /Applications/NeoOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice.bin
Identifier: org.neooffice.NeoOffice
Version: 3.0 (3.0 Patch 7 Intel (pluby:guibomacmini.local.))
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [129]

Interval Since Last Report: 1187 sec
Crashes Since Last Report: 2
Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 1143 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 2

Date/Time: 2009-08-14 15:55:09.434 -0400
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L30)

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

Thank you for the crash log. Your crash log indicates that the crash is occurring deep in NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code. While it is not very clear where exactly what the bug in the OpenOffice.org code is, it appears that the OpenOffice.org code is repainting a shape with, possibly, some shadow settings around it.

Does this sound like something that is in your document?

If not, I am not sure what we can do without a sample document as I suspect that this bug only occurs in very few documents as I have never seen crashing in this particular chain of OpenOffice.org objects before.

Patrick

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

One more question: can you launch the /Applications/Utilities/Console application and paste the last 20 or 30 lines from the console.log into this forum topic? This isn't a substitute for a sample document that we can use to reproduce the bug, but it may help us narrow down what kind of shapes might be causing the bug.

Patrick

ChuckAmata · Blue Pill Joined: Aug 14, 2009 Posts: 3

You are correct. Many of the objects have the shadow turned on. I've included a sanitized segment of the file I'm working on (I verified that I can get it to crash when duplicating a slide and copy/pasting objects.

Aug 14 15:55:09 Mac-Pro [0x0-0xa30a3].org.neooffice.NeoOffice[3711]: Invalid memory access of location 00000030 eip=341999ea
Aug 14 15:55:12 Mac-Pro ReportCrash[3773]: Formulating crash report for process soffice.bin[3711]
Aug 14 15:55:13 Mac-Pro ReportCrash[3773]: Saved crashreport to /Users/Chuck/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/soffice.bin_2009-08-14-155509_Mac-Pro.crash using uid: 501 gid: 501, euid: 501 egid: 501
Aug 14 15:55:13 Mac-Pro com.apple.launchd[129] ([0x0-0xa30a3].org.neooffice.NeoOffice[3711]): Exited abnormally:

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

Thank you for the sample document. I can repeatedly reproduce the crashing by doing the following steps:

1. Duplicate the slide

2. Click on the duplicated slide's yellow tabbed object and copy the yellow tabbed object

3. Click outside of the slide and paste

I will start debugging this and when I find a fix for this OpenOffice.org bug, I will post a test patch for you to try. It appears that the OpenOffice.org code is freeing a block of memory before it is finished using that block so this may take me a few days to find a fix.

Patrick

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

I have opened bug 3512 to track this issue.

--fran

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I have bad news. After working all afternoon Friday and all day on both Saturday and Sunday on this bug, I have found that this OpenOffice.org bug is not something that I can fix. All evidence points to the OpenOffice.org deleting an object at some point and then another bit of their code tries to perform actions on that deleted object. The problem is that there are millions of lines of OpenOffice.org code and finding the code that is doing early deletion of the object is like finding a needle in a haystack.

What I did find is that someone has filed the same bug in OpenOffice.org's issue tracking system. I have attached the template.odp file that you attached and posted explicit steps on how to reproduce the crash in that OpenOffice.org issue. Hopefully, the OpenOffice.org engineers will eventually find what code they changed in OpenOffice.org 3.0 that causes this crashing.

In the meantime, you may want to try installing NeoOffice 2.2.5. That version of NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 which does not have this crashing bug.

Patrick

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. Since Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org engineers have apparently decided to not to fix this crashing bug in their code before their next release, I have implemented a hacky fix that should prevent crashing. While the copy and paste operations will no longer crash, please note that some of the colors may not paste correctly. This is because the fix I made was to detect when the OpenOffice.org code had lost a required object property and, in those cases, set a default value.

This is not a perfect fix, but since I was unable to find the true cause of the bug (and neither have the OpenOffice.org engineers), I felt that using default property values was an improvement from the current crashing behavior.

If you or anyone else is a NeoOffice 3.0.1 Early Access Program member, can you install the following test patch and tell us if my fix works for you?:

Intel:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.0.1_Early_Access-Patch-1-Test-5-Intel.dmg

PowerPC:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.0.1_Early_Access-Patch-1-Test-5-PowerPC.dmg

Patrick

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

FYI. The fix is included in NeoOffice 3.0.1 Early Access Patch 2. You can download the patch from the following URL:

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/earlyaccesspatch.php

If you are not a member of the NeoOffice 3.0.1 Early Access Program, the fix will be available in the NeoOffice 3.0.1 release currently scheduled for 27 October 2009.