Problem viewing attachments in Openoffice: soffice wrapper calls oosplash.bin

[Kenrick Bingham]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org-common

As Tanguy Ortolo <email address hidden> writes at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=471167:

> All the OpenOffice.org end-user programs (openoffice, soffice,
> oowriter...) call /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin, or
> /usr/lib/openoffice/program/oosplash.bin if it exists and is executable.
>
> The latter, oosplash.bin, detaches itself from the calling process, that
> ends silently, while OpenOffice.org continues to run as a child of init.
>
> This can be a problem when opening attachements from an email reader.
> Some mail readers will save the attachement to a temporary file and spawn
> OpenOffice.org to open it. As OpenOffice.org returns almost immediatly,
> the reader can think it has been closed, and delete the temporary file.
> Then, when OpenOffice.org has ended to start, it cannot find the file it
> has been asked to open.

The wrapper causing this is /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice from the package openoffice.org-common.

  kenny@min ~ 16:13 % lsb_release -rd
  Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
  Release: 8.04
  kenny@min ~ 16:13 % apt-cache policy openoffice.org-common
  openoffice.org-common:
    Installed: 1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2

This problem wasn't present in Feisty.

An uneducated guess for a possible solution: Add an option, say -nooosplash, that would prevent this behaviour, and add this option to all relevant lines in the files /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org* (-> /etc/mailcap) in the following packages:

  openoffice.org-base: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-base
  openoffice.org-calc: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-calc
  openoffice.org-draw: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-draw
  openoffice.org-filter-binfilter: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-filter-binfilter
  openoffice.org-impress: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-impress
  openoffice.org-math: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-math
  openoffice.org-writer: /usr/lib/mime/packages/openoffice.org-writer

Alternatively, just removing the lines

  # test for availability of the fast external splash
  if [ "$sd_binary" = "soffice.bin" -a -x "$sd_prog/oosplash.bin" ] ; then
      sd_binary="oosplash.bin"
  fi

from /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice solves the problem for me.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

The program calling openoffice should not be deleting the file.