[upstream] Address data sources missing

[NoOp]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

Over on the Ubuntu user's mailing list someone asked a question about
Thunderbird address data sources. So in the process of replying I check
on my systems & found:

OOo 2.1 installed from Openoffice.org files directly (installed on
Dapper) has:

File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button
- Evolution
- Groupwise
- Evolution LDAP
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book
- Other external data source

OOo 2.2(rc3) (Ubuntu'ized Feisty version) only shows:

File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button
- Evolution
- Groupwise
- Evolution LDAP
- Other external data source

Note: Thunderbird is installed & working on both machines.

I then installed OOo 2.2(rc3) (non-Ubuntu'ized version) on Ubuntu Dapper using the files from OOo and the results are exactly the same as my OOo 2.1 (non-Ubuntuized) version:

File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button
- Evolution
- Groupwise
- Evolution LDAP
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book
- Other external data source

The Ubuntu version is missing:
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book

Note: related bug from earlier versions appears to be https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/35671

[Braden (braden)]

Some comments after reading
<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/shared_profiles.html>...

Different cache directories for each application would not be much of a step
forward. Apps can already get this by setting up their own profile directory
(indeed, that's what they do). Having apps be able to share a single cache (per
user) is a major usability win. Further discussion of this probably belongs in
bug 135061.

Prefs... IMO, the most desirable situation from a usability standpoint would be
to have Gecko prefs shared. Apps that don't want that can set up their own
profile directories and share nothing with other apps.

[Jud-me (jud-me)]

-> ccarlen

[Ccarlen (ccarlen)]

Taking.

[Bzbarsky (bzbarsky)]

*** Bug 148102 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ccarlen (ccarlen)]

*** Bug 148509 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Bugzilla-rtimwest (bugzilla-rtimwest)]

This means that the browser and mail now conflict with each other.

This means that separate menu selections, scripts, or icons for "mozilla" and
"mozilla mail" no longer work independently, or consistently, depdending on what
else is running.

This means that naive users have to be told, "mostly, you can just click on this
to check mail, but if the browser is running, you have to do something
completely different" and "mostly, you just click on this to get to the web, but
if you've got e-mail open...".

This means that users that are NOT used to having tabs can no longer just fire
off multiple sessions and cut-and-paste or compare, as they routinely do with
IE, for example.

This means that, now running mail and the browser as one session but in
different desktops, clicking on a link in an e-mail message will open the link
on another desktop, out of view rather than in front of the user.

If multiple windows are open in one session, and Edit-Preferences is selected in
each, it branches to one and only one copy of the preferences dialog. Is this
impossible across sessions?

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 148839 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Jonabbey (jonabbey)]

This issue is especially bad for the common user on Linux/X, as programs like
KMail, etc., are used to ordering the platform browser to run with a given url,
in the expectation that either the running application will just open a new
window on the new url, or that the application won't mind multiple copies of
itself running.

It would be nice that if one ran 'mozilla', or 'mozilla-mail', that mozilla
would look to see if a browser instance was running in the same user account
with the same DISPLAY environment set, and if so, a signal would be sent to the
running instance so that it could open up the appopriate window.

I believe this is how it works on Windows now. It would make this issue much
less objectionable on X Windows if we could get the same kind of behavior.

[Ccarlen (ccarlen)]

> It would be nice that if one ran 'mozilla', or 'mozilla-mail', that mozilla
> would look to see if a browser instance was running

Very true, but a separate issue (XPApps) If what you're talking about was done,
there would be less need for mozilla to be able to share a profile amongst
multiple instances. This bug is not about the behavior of mozilla, but being
able to share profiles for applications which really need to do this (not
nescesarily mozilla).

[Bugzilla-rtimwest (bugzilla-rtimwest)]

>>This bug is not about the behavior of mozilla<<

People reporting this issue as a bug in Mozilla's behavior have had their bug
reports rolled up (DUPME) into this one- or discarded (RESOLVED). Either action
apparently discards/disregards votes for the previous bugs that were so handled.
The brings up questions as to how accurately it's impact can now be judged.

If this bug is not about the behavior of Mozilla, perhaps this action was
inappropriate. Those people are now tracking this bug to see what the resolution
will be, if any.

[Bzbarsky (bzbarsky)]

*** Bug 154074 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 154875 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ham-mozilla-org (ham-mozilla-org)]

Marking http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154875 as a duplicate of
this bug is, IMHO, misleading.

154875 is an issue that's been driving myself and several others I know up the
wall - we were all happily using RC2, without this behaviour, (although AFAIAW
all of us were fortunate never to have profile corruption problems), and
suddenly things have gone pear-shaped.

The reporter of bug 154875 sounds quite upset by it all, and I can see where
s/he is coming from - all my window-manager shortcuts for opening browsers are
now broken without any apparent workaround (since they point to /..../mozilla),
and I have to keep paging through all my virtual desktops to find wherever the
heck the last remaining instance of EITHER a browser window OR EVEN a mail
window is hiding, and then Ctrl-N / Ctrl-1 off that window.

I wouldn't mind at all if someone (anyone?) had proposed a workable workaround,
but for now it seems my only option is to downgrade to RC2, or stop using
Mozilla altogether (if you think this is OTT, then think how much time is wasted
paging through 9 virtual desktops almost every time you want to open a new
browser window!)

HOWEVER, marking 154875 as a duplicate hides this entire problem. I read this
bug report first (135137) and decided it was a different problem. It was only by
noting Robert West's comment (#10), and reading all the dupes that I realised it
was now officially the same bug. (!).

[Jruderman (jruderman)]

See also bug 122698, "Detect [and use] currently running instance of Mozilla
when app is launched a second time". Several of the dups of this bug are really
dups of 122698. It's probably easier to fix bug 122698 than it is to fix all
profile-corruption and other dataloss bugs that crop up when two instances try
to share a profile.

[John-marmion (john-marmion)]

OpenOffice.org(OOo) integrates with mozilla. Please see:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6391

What interests me here is the Mozilla Address Book integration with OOo. This is
a readonly access by OOo. But following the fix for bug #76431, it is no longer
possible to simultaineously run the Browser and access Mozilla Address Book data
from within OOo.

The reason for adding this comment is two fold, one to draw attention to the
effect of this on 3rdparty products such as OOo and secondly to support the
requests for the ability to support a readonly access to a second instance in
the spirit of 4.x.

[Teilo+bugzilla (teilo+bugzilla)]

*** Bug 160026 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ajschult (ajschult)]

*** Bug 160402 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Mozilla-jgaunt (mozilla-jgaunt)]

changing component, since this deals specifically with the work needed to make
profiles accessible by multiple processes. adding the nspr
semaphore/memorysharing bug as a blocker

[Nyet (nyet)]

Please don't forget to take into account multiple instances running on SEPARATE
machines using a common NFS mounted home... I'm not sure if that is a separate
issue or not. If it is, I could not find it.

[Moz-poelzi (moz-poelzi)]

gconf uses a technique that the first instance is opening a port on which the
other instances from the same user can connect to. only the first instance use
the files directly (better: write them).
i think this technique is not bad, because the normal way is that the profile is
located in a networkwide lan where ports can opened and connected in them.

if the first instance of the application dies, another becomes the writer instance.

[Lummox418 (lummox418)]

I would like to help this work on Mac OS 9. To do this, I need a description of
the proposed shared profile architecture. I have not yet found such a
description in this or related bugs, or at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/shared_profiles.html , which describes
the problem but not the solution.

Mac OS 9 has an IPC mechanism and with this information I will be able to
provide assistance in using it for this job. Thank you.

[Mozilla-jgaunt (mozilla-jgaunt)]

I'm working on a tech spec right now, and when it is coherent enough to post for
comments I'll post it, uh, somewhere ( probably newsgroups and m.o ). It will
only outline the preferences work, but the architecture is one we hope to be
able to leverage to share the other profile data.

[Rembert (rembert)]

Can anyone tell me the difference between bug 122698 and this one. I was very
disappointed to find Mozilla falling back to bug 122698 when upgrading from 1.1b
to 1.2a. Why wasn't the patch mentioned in 122698 included in the new
run-mozilla.sh?

[Mozilla-jgaunt (mozilla-jgaunt)]

bug 122698 deals only with start up behavior. This bug deals with the ability to
run multiple programs that all use mozilla, more specifically gecko, as a
rendering engine.

bug 122698 doesn't want to "share" the profile data between apps, it just wants
to check for a currently running version of mozilla and open a window from that
process. The bug aims at allowing two or more processes, like chimera and
phoenix and netscape, to run at the same time on the same profile without
profile corruption, deadlocks, or any other Bad Stuff(tm).

Docs have been posted(or rather links to m.o) to the n.p.m prefs,xpcom,&
embedding as well as posted at
http://www.mozilla/org/projects/embedding/profileSharing/index.html that talk
about the design we are working on for sharing the profile data.

[Cyp (cyp)]

Might it be possible to have an interim 'solution' that would keep both sides
happy?

For sites where Mozilla is used by technically unsavvy users, the prompt to
setup a new profile leads to headaches for support staff, and everyone I've
asked would settle for a message that says "Close the other Mozilla first"
instead of the new profile setup prompt.

Another solution would be a simple prefs.js setting to disable the locking.
Those of us following this and related bug reports that have a problem with
the new locking behaviour are fully aware of the risk of profile corruption
and yet are willing to take that risk (primarily because the alternative
really isn't an alternative), and a means to disable it would make us happy
campers again.

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 184913 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ed-sender-192668 (ed-sender-192668)]

Cyrus,

rm -f ~/.mozilla/profilename/wierd-dirname/lock

I'm keeping that command in my mozilla script until they figure out how to fix
the problem correctly.

[Kdavis (kdavis)]

Here is the workaround I came up with:

#!/bin/sh

#URL TO OPEN
URL=$1

#MOZILLA REMOTE COMMAND
COMMAND="openurl("$1",new-tab)"
#COMMAND="openurl("$1",new-window)"

#CHANGE DIRECTORY TO MOZILLA
cd /usr/local/mozilla

#SEARCH FOR MOZILLA WINDOW
xwininfo -root -tree | grep -q -s phoenix
RETVAL=$?

if [ $RETVAL = 0 ] ; then
  ./mozilla -remote $COMMAND
else
  ./mozilla $URL
fi

[Felix Miata (mrmazda)]

*** Bug 185367 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 185586 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 186498 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Bzbarsky (bzbarsky)]

*** Bug 190718 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 191179 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 192572 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Rhkramer (rhkramer)]

The bug I reported, Bug 190718, is *not* a duplicate of this bug -- far from it
-- in most respects it seems almost the opposite.

My problem is this: In Mozilla 1.1 (Mandrake 9.0) when any portion of Mozilla
crashes, all my open Mozilla tabs and windows close. (Since it is not untypical
to have 150 tabs open spread across 15 or so Mozilla windows, and some of those
windows may have open "text boxes" for editing TWiki pages, I lose a significant
amount of work and context.)

It seems no matter how I open Mozilla, only one instance is created.

In one of the comments above it is stated that this is how applications in
Windows behave. It is not, at least as of Win95, and if it has changed it is a
change for the worse. The truth is that in Windows there are ways to open new
copies of an application so they are new windows/tabs of the same instance and
there is a way(s) to open an application so a new instance is created.

In Windows (95), if you open a new application window by entering the
application name on the command line, clicking the icon, or clicking on the
start menu entry, you get a new instance of the application that shares nothing
with the previous instance. (Well, that statement may be a little too strong --
it presumably shares the preferences and things like that.) The point is, a new
instance of the program is created, and if some other instance of the program
crashes, this new instance does not crash (unless the crash kills all of Windows).

On the other hand, if you go into an open window or tab of a running instance of
a program and click New (or Open??), you create a new Window or Tab that is part
of the existing instance. If something happens to cause a crash of this new
window, all open windows and tabs that are part of this instance close, but
those that are part of some other instance remain open and functional.

IIUC some other people are pushing for improvements or changes to the single
instance behavior. My bug (RFE) is requesting that there be a means to create
multiple instances.

Is it clear?

If so, I think somebody needs to rewrite some bugs or create some "meta bugs" to
properly collect the votes. (Note that the two behaviors I describe above are
not mutually exclusive -- there should be a means to do both, and at least
knowledgable users should be aware of how to do both.)

I will now basically paste these same comments into bug 190178 and attempt to
reopen it. Please don't close it as a duplicate of this bug again -- perhaps
there is some other bug that it is truly a duplicate of, but it's not this one.

Or, another way of saying what I'm trying to say -- the writeup on this bug
135137 is so confusing, it's hard to tell what it is about. If my bug truly is
a duplicate of this bug, this bug needs to be rewritten (a new "meta bug") very
clearly, and all the comments to this bug (135137) that confuse the issue need
to be discarded.

Randy Kramer

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 190718 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[R-contact2009-awhlink-com (r-contact2009-awhlink-com)]

*** Bug 105181 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[R-contact2009-awhlink-com (r-contact2009-awhlink-com)]

*** Bug 111070 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Ccarlen (ccarlen)]

Setting to milestone that's not passed.

[Malcolm-ferguson (malcolm-ferguson)]

Randy,

There's no guarantees under Windows whether you get a new process or same the
process. It's up to the application developer. If they don't do anything
special, you will get multiple processes. What changed with Win95 (well, Win32)
was that the HANDLE to the previous instance was no longer passed to WinMain, so
application developers had to start using named mutexes, or named pipes or
FindWindow if they wanted to have one process only. Try launching Word multiple
times, you will not succeed (Office XP at least).

Explorer/Internet Explorer is an interesting case. It has an option in its
preferences dialog to run multiple processes. This is the first thing that I
enable when I sit down at fresh installation/new user environment. The stupid
default of having it disabled will mean the shell dies whenever a crash occurs
in another window. Anyway, IE allows multiple processes, which is vital IMHO
considering how often I make it crash. Some of the shared data is accessed
through separate singleton processes, like the Protected Storage service that
originally came with IE4.

I would really like to see the ability to launch Mozilla in multiple processes.
 This will make it more reliable and more useful. Concurrency of the shared
data is going to be a problem though. Do we have something in the toolkit that
allows interprocess communication on all the Mozilla platforms? E.g. a CORBA
based profile/configuration service/daemon would be very useful.

[Cyp (cyp)]

Randy,

I suspect that the reason why your RFE was made a dup of this one is because
this bug needs to be resolved before your RFE can be tackled. (In that sense, it
should be 'depends on' this bug, not a dup of it).

Malcolm,

the reason why the HINSTANCE of the previous instance of an application is not
passed to other instances is because HINSTANCE is a win16 thing. In Win16
HINSTANCE is the selector of data segment. Under win32 that selector would be
meaningless since each application has its own descriptor table (unlike under
win16 where _all_ win applications share one descriptor table, ie run in _one_
memory space).

When you start a new instance of Mozilla under Windows, it looks for an existing
instance, and if found, sends that instance a message to open a new window - not
unlike what happens when select "File" -> "New Window". After posting the
message the new instance exits.

There is nothing unusual about this - quite a few applications do it including
Word and IE.

If Moz were to continue as a separate process, it would run into the profile
sharing issues that this bug is all about.

> Explorer/Internet Explorer is an interesting case. It has an option in
> its preferences dialog to run multiple processes.

It does not run multiple processes in the traditional sense of a separate
process. It runs its message loop thread in a separate process (the window,
and only the window, is in a separate process). The window classes, as well
as all data that is not window-specific is in shared memory space. This is
somewhat analogous to creating new processes with the rfork(RFMEM) syscall
under BSD or clone(CLONE_VM) under Linux - bad code in one process will kill
that, and only that, process, but that does not mean that all siblings are
immune to corruption of (shared) mem. If Explorer/IE truly ran one entirely
separate instance per window, every instance of an Explorer/IE window would be
using several megs of memory.

Enough off-topicness for today. :)

[Ccarlen (ccarlen)]

-> 1.4b

[Ajschult (ajschult)]

*** Bug 200803 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Heiny (heiny)]

I second Nye Liu's comment #19 - this needs to work both when additional
instances of an application are started on a given machine (or when another
application like Evolution or KMail or whatever says something like "mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org"), and if the same user starts Mozilla on another machine
in an NFS environment.

[Bugzilla+nospam (bugzilla+nospam)]

Security databases (cert/key) are part of the Mozilla profile data, and were
forgotten in this bug. I created bug 217538 to track this problem, and added a
dependency.

[Agracebush (agracebush)]

*** Bug 216437 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Steffen Wilberg (steffen-wilberg)]

*** Bug 222661 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Yuanyi21 (yuanyi21)]

Does anybody know the current status of this work?

[Darin-moz (darin-moz)]

kyle: i think work on this bug was suspended when AOL decided that it no longer
had use for gecko. AOL was the major driver behind this feature. that said,
there is talk at the Mozilla Foundation about resuming work on this feature.

[Mozilla-bugzilla-altdns (mozilla-bugzilla-altdns)]

The problem with most workarounds I have seen is this:

Starting a new window using the remote features does not allow you to log into
the same site twice using different credentials. What if you want to log into
phpMyAdmin for example using two different usernames? Because Mozilla shares
the session cookie between all browser windows in the same process, this is
impossible. The only solution is either use two different browsers or be forced to
use different profiles.

Frankly, every single browser besides Mozilla and clones can seem to figure this
simple issue out, so why is Mozilla's team so half ass backwards? IMHO, Firebird
is the best browser for Linux by far, but this one issue cripples it so bad that I am
usually forced to use an inferior browser just so I can have uninterrupted work.

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 230944 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Spam-minneboken (spam-minneboken)]

*** Bug 244450 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Kevin Brosnan (kbrosnan)]

*** Bug 253946 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[SoloTurn (soloturn)]

hi malcolm

internet explorer has two possibilities to get multiple processes:
1. click on the normal start icon starts a new process,
   doing "new window" in an existing window uses the same process
2. enable the option "every window in a new process"
   then even open in a new window ends up with a new process
   probably the way you described it.

i never succeeded in clicking on the normal start icon without creating a new
process.

but in general i find this behaviour elegant ... somehow it seems to me that
other applications might have some code in it to look if there is already a
running instance of that application and and tell that instance to create a new
window with the new contents. it seems internet explorer is just not doing that,
so i believe strongly it is programmed like that and you cannot switch it off.

this means:
- you can log in multiple times (with one instance)
- one instance of internet explorer instances crashes
  with all its windows, no other instances affected

firefox by contrary looks for an existing running instance.

[Neil-octrix (neil-octrix)]

Is it true that other browsers only have one user profile for a given user
login, whereas Mozilla/Firefox can have several?

[Christian Biesinger (cbiesinger)]

that is correct.

[Jo-hermans (jo-hermans)]

*** Bug 315194 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[twelvegates (twelvegates)]

To me it's not obvious what the idea is behind this Profile selection dialog when starting a second instance of Firefox. Maybe there are some reason for that.
But when starting Firefox on another X display presenting this dialog is annoying and useless. It's even more annoying when started with '-P default'.

[Heiny (heiny)]

> But when starting Firefox on another X display presenting this dialog is
> annoying and useless.

It's worse than that. It's anti-productive. I frequently have several logins on several different Linux boxes, sharing my home directory via NFS/automount. But I can only have Mozilla/Firefox active on ONE of those machines. So I have to track down which machine it's running on, terminate that session, and then I can run it on the one I need to.

Ugh.

[Vincent+moz (vincent+moz)]

A way to solve this problem would be to do display migration (e.g. with "teleport" -- I've never used it though). But does Firefox support it?

[Ask-swva (ask-swva)]

> A way to solve this problem would be to do display migration (e.g. with
> "teleport" -- I've never used it though). But does Firefox support it?

a) that's not a real fix... maybe I want separate instances
b) this is a problem on Windows as well

[Vda-linux (vda-linux)]

Firefox 1.5 "Deer Park" compiled from source. Cannot start second Firefox if there is a first one already running with all its windows visible only on X server on _another machine_.

I read all the comments. Fixing this will require transaction-like safe updates of profile data...

[Vda-linux (vda-linux)]

To clarify: "can't start" looks like this. Second instance of ff 1.5 says:

"Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you
must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system. [OK]"

soon (~3 seconds) after I start it.

[clemens (clemens-endorphin)]

This is still a pending issue. The last comment from the person, who the bug is assigned to (Conrad Carlen), made the last comment 3 years ago.

Conrad: If you are still interested (and actually the right person to handle this), please can you give us an update on the issue?

If not, can someone reassign the bug? Maybe to the QA team.

[Bluef0x (bluef0x)]

I hope this assessment isn't too immature. Wouldn't it be possible [and not difficult] to have the preferences read in and then the file handles dropped? This would mean that when changes are made, the entire file has to be read back in, modified, and saved [to prevent forking], and the handle dropped again.

[Benjamin Smedberg (Mozilla) [:bs] (benjamin-smedbergs)]

This might be mozilla2 fodder, but it's not going to make 1.9 (and we probably wouldn't even take a patch if it were available).

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

Over on the Ubuntu user's mailing list someone asked a question about
Thunderbird address data sources. So in the process of replying I check
on my systems & found:

OOo 2.1 installed from Openoffice.org files directly (installed on
Dapper) has:

File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button
- Evolution
- Groupwise
- Evolution LDAP
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book
- Other external data source

OOo 2.2(rc3) (Ubuntu'ized Feisty version) only shows:

File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button
- Evolution
- Groupwise
- Evolution LDAP
- Other external data source

Note: Thunderbird is installed & working on both machines.

I then installed OOo 2.2(rc3) (non-Ubuntu'ized version) on Ubuntu Dapper using the files from OOo and the results are exactly the same as my OOo 2.1 (non-Ubuntuized) version:

File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button
- Evolution
- Groupwise
- Evolution LDAP
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book
- Other external data source

The Ubuntu version is missing:
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book

Note: related bug from earlier versions appears to be https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/35671

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Can this please be marked as confirmed?

9096 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/90906

I'd also recommend setting the priority to medium or high as many Ubuntu users will be using Mozilla/Thunderbird as their primary email client and address book.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

you can access the KDE address book when openoffice.org-kde is installed.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

The Mozilla / Netscape, Thunderbird and LDAP address book are only available, when OOo is built using an internal mozilla 1.7.5 copy, including a 250k patch; we currently do not provide support for this version, including security updates for releases.

Alexander: I'm attaching the patch here; please could you have a look, if the patch can be upgraded to our current firefox version and if there is a chance to integrate that functionality into the Ubuntu firefox build?

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

assigned to Alexander

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

oh a hard-to-read diff :) ... can you get/create a unified diff with good bunch of context and C function info of it?

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Changed to needs info.

[greenhunter (tierfreunde-hagenburg)]

What kind of info is needed?

[Vseerror (vseerror)]

*** Bug 342870 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 03/28/2007 01:33 AM, Matthias Klose wrote:
> you can access the KDE address book when openoffice.org-kde is
> installed.

That is confirmed - I finally installed kubuntu-desktop on a test system
today. Any status re:

- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- LDAP address book

[Martin Kretzschmar (martink)]

IIRC past versions of the patch were considered non-upstreamable by
the patch authors (or readers?), doing evil things like removing
locking (probably file locking, to allow access to the addressbook
while Mozilla is running?). Sorry for the lack of details, maybe the
situation is totally different.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Actually we cannot work with the currently attached patch, because its not an isolated patch.

To boost this issue, someone should go through openoffice.org (cvs/svn?) and see if we can find the initial checkin that patch. From there we could probably gather the rest of the info needed.

Thanks,

 - Alexander

[Wolf Pusztay (wolf-pusztay)]

Thank you for your response.

Does this mean that someone else has witnessed the same behaviour I have
reported?

Regards,

Wolf

-----Original Message-----
From: <email address hidden> [mailto:<email address hidden>] On Behalf Of
Alexander Sack
Sent: June 7, 2007 7:30 PM
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 93546] Re: Openoffice.org Address data sources missing

Actually we cannot work with the currently attached patch, because its not
an isolated patch.

To boost this issue, someone should go through openoffice.org (cvs/svn?) and
see if we can find the initial checkin that patch. From there we could
probably gather the rest of the info needed.

Thanks,

 - Alexander

--
Openoffice.org Address data sources missing
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/93546
You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber of a
duplicate bug.

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[Vseerror (vseerror)]

*** Bug 345298 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Zug-treno (zug-treno)]

*** Bug 330834 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[greenhunter (tierfreunde-hagenburg)]

this bug is still not fixed in gutsy.

[greenhunter (tierfreunde-hagenburg)]

Hello,

what is up with this bug? It is so old and not fixed!

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

this is a wishlist bug we usually won't fix on our own. If you want to see this happening, please lobby for this feature in forums.mozillazine.org and if there is a great amount of positive feedback go on and file an enhancement bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org

 - Alexander

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 11/06/2007 02:08 PM, Alexander Sack wrote:
> this is a wishlist bug we usually won't fix on our own. If you want to
> see this happening, please lobby for this feature in
> forums.mozillazine.org and if there is a great amount of positive
> feedback go on and file an enhancement bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org
>
> - Alexander
>
> ** Changed in: firefox (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided => Wishlist
>

How on earth can this be a "Wishlist" bug when the standard version of
OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) include these Address Data
Sources in the default OOo package? I suggest that you go ahead and
install OOo from OpenOffice and test for yourself.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Attached screenshot of standard OpenOffice Address Data Source list.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 10:26:41PM -0000, NoOp wrote:
> On 11/06/2007 02:08 PM, Alexander Sack wrote:
> > this is a wishlist bug we usually won't fix on our own. If you want to
> > see this happening, please lobby for this feature in
> > forums.mozillazine.org and if there is a great amount of positive
> > feedback go on and file an enhancement bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org
> >
> > - Alexander
> >
> > ** Changed in: firefox (Ubuntu)
> > Importance: Undecided => Wishlist
> >
>
> How on earth can this be a "Wishlist" bug when the standard version of
> OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) include these Address Data
> Sources in the default OOo package? I suggest that you go ahead and
> install OOo from OpenOffice and test for yourself.
>

read above ... its about firefox ... the openoffice importance wasn't
changed.

 - Alexander

[Coren (coren+)]

I've taken a deeper look at it. The main problem is that OOo integration with the mozilla products is totally outdated.
They based their work on a really old and unsecure version of the mozilla engine (1.7).

It's now possible to build OOo against a decent version of firefox for the nss/nspr part, but this specific part of AddressBook was not changed at all. They have just disable the build of those part, in this case.

Displaying the 4 options in "File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button" is quite easy. It's the removal of one lines in "extensions/source/abpilot/makefile.mk" of OOo source code.

But the connector used for Thunderbird (an OOo datasource, in fact), in "connectivity/source/drivers/mozab/" is totally unable to compile with current versions of thunderbird-dev and firefox-dev. Some needed header files, for instance, are totally removed from the devel packages. And even after adding them from the mozilla CVS, I have seen so many compile errors that it seems clear that there's a few years of differences.

The current stance, for OOo, is to patch and patch again their mozilla 1.7.0 source in order to keep compatibility with changes of formats in address book : it's less costly for them than to update all the OOo concerned parts.

The real fix for this issue is not to port this big patch into firefox/tbird, but to port OpenOffice to use current versions of thoses mozilla products.

=> You won't be able to see this issue fixed before a long time, IMHO.

[Coren (coren+)]

hmmm ... well after insisting a little on the build system on OpenOffice.org, and copying some headers from a mozilla thunderbird built from 2.x cvs branch, I managed to get a build of the Mozilla driver for OpenOffice, without the Mozilla 1.7 stuff.

The driver "com.sun.star.comp.sdbc.MozAb.driver" is there, but I still get the error that the sdbc driver does not exist ...

[Benjamin Smedberg (Mozilla) [:bs] (benjamin-smedbergs)]

*** Bug 405258 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Sami Liedes (sliedes)]

I wonder how Konqueror does this. This has just always worked in it, at least for me (and this is a major reason for me to use Konqueror as my primary browser, but it doesn't _always_ work quite as well as FF). Might be that they use some strange KDE glue though, like a single process that manages the files and the other processes just communicate to it somehow, although this also seems to always have worked over NFS so I wonder.

[Vseerror (vseerror)]

*** Bug 370065 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 11:14:54PM -0000, Coren wrote:
> hmmm ... well after insisting a little on the build system on
> OpenOffice.org, and copying some headers from a mozilla thunderbird
> built from 2.x cvs branch, I managed to get a build of the Mozilla
> driver for OpenOffice, without the Mozilla 1.7 stuff.
>
> The driver "com.sun.star.comp.sdbc.MozAb.driver" is there, but I still
> get the error that the sdbc driver does not exist ...
>

Would be great if you could come up with a clean patch, so we can
finally close this bug :).

Thanks,

 - Alexander

[Shirish Agarwal (shirishag75)]

any update on this, coren or asac ?

[Flabdablet (flabdablet)]

Mozilla address book connectors I can see being a problem, because the Mozilla address book format is insane. But why is LDAP address book support missing?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

This has been fixed in Gutsy (UOOo 2.3.0) -
File|Templates|Address Book Source| Administrate button - shows:

-Evolution
-Groupwise
-Evolution LDAP
-Mozilla/Netscape
-Thunderbird
-KDE address book
-LDAP address data
-Other external data source

I no longer run Dapper (UOOo 2.0.2), Edgy (UOOo 2.0.4), or Feisty
(UOOo2.2.0). Perhaps requesting that at least UOOo 2.3.1 to be
backported would resolve the issue on earlier versions. As an FWI: OOo
standard (http://www.openoffice.org/) is currently at 2.3.1 and is
scheduled to go to 2.4.0 shortly. You can install OOo standard if
necessary - it's not difficult to do. However, you will lose some
filters & features (Works filters, gstreamer sound etc) but the sound
issue can generally be resolved by adding jmf, or installing the
OxygenOffice branch.

[Flabdablet (flabdablet)]

Well, I'm running Gutsy, I have openoffice.org-core 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3, and I see only

-Evolution
-Groupwise
-Evolution LDAP
-Other external data source

After sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-kde, I get

-Evolution
-Groupwise
-Evolution LDAP
-KDE address book
-Other external data source

So which package is the "LDAP address data" hiding in?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 03/08/2008 08:43 PM, Flabdablet wrote:
> Well, I'm running Gutsy, I have openoffice.org-core 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3,
> and I see only
>
> -Evolution
> -Groupwise
> -Evolution LDAP
> -Other external data source
>
> After sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-kde, I get
>
> -Evolution
> -Groupwise
> -Evolution LDAP
> -KDE address book
> -Other external data source
>
> So which package is the "LDAP address data" hiding in?
>

My sincere apologies, my mistake - I had both StarOffice8 and OOo
Standard open when I checked - *not* (U)OOo. It's been so long since
I've used (U)OOo that I'd forgotten that I only have (U)OOo installed on
one test machine - and in checking that, I see that you are correct and
(U)OOo has still not been fixed.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 03/08/2008 09:32 PM, NoOp wrote:
> On 03/08/2008 08:43 PM, Flabdablet wrote:
>> Well, I'm running Gutsy, I have openoffice.org-core 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3,
>> and I see only
>>
>> -Evolution
>> -Groupwise
>> -Evolution LDAP
>> -Other external data source
>>
>> After sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-kde, I get
>>
>> -Evolution
>> -Groupwise
>> -Evolution LDAP
>> -KDE address book
>> -Other external data source
>>
>> So which package is the "LDAP address data" hiding in?
>>
>
> My sincere apologies, my mistake - I had both StarOffice8 and OOo
> Standard open when I checked - *not* (U)OOo. It's been so long since
> I've used (U)OOo that I'd forgotten that I only have (U)OOo installed on
> one test machine - and in checking that, I see that you are correct and
> (U)OOo has still not been fixed.
>

You'll like this even less.

I've just installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Alpha6 and discovered that (U)OOo
included with that is:
BuildVersion=openoffice.org-core 1:2.4.0~rc2-1ubuntu3, Tue Mar 4
(Standard OOo is just now testing on rc4 & tomorrow at rc5)

File|Templates|Address Book Source| is not even available in the above
Hardy version (it is in standard OOo 2.4.0rc4 which I am running on this
machine). Instead, the File|Templates| menu selection choices in (U)OOo
Hardy Alpha6 show:

File|Templates|
  - Organize
  - Save
  - Edit

Address Book Source is missing completely.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

NoOp,

Its there for me on Ubuntu hardy, but it is still missing the Mozilla/Netscape, Thunderbird, LDAP address data parts. Perhaps you are missing parts of OOo on your system. Install the openoffice.org meta-package and see if that helps.

Chris

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Interesting. Did you upgrade or do a fresh Hardy install? I am checking
on a fresh Hardy install (fully updated as of today) and do not find
File|Templates|Address Book Source| only:
File|Templates|
  - Organize
  - Save
  - Edit

My version on Hardy, according to /usr/lib/openoffice/program/versionrc is:

[Version]
AllLanguages=en-US
BuildVersion=openoffice.org-core 1:2.4.0~rc2-1ubuntu3, Tue Mar 4
08:27:13 UTC 2008
buildid=680m8(Build:9276)
ExtensionUpdateURL=http://updateext.services.openoffice.org/ProductUpdateService/check.Update
OOOBaseVersion=2.4
ProductBuildid=9276
ProductMajor=680
ProductMinor=8
ProductPatch=
ProductSource=OOH680
UpdateID=OpenOffice.org_2_en-US
UpdateURL=
UpdateUserAgent=OpenOffice.org 2.4 (680m8(Build:9276); $_OS; $_ARCH;
BundledLanguages=en-US)
Vendor=Debian and Ubuntu

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Its an upgrade but I have removed my ~/.openoffice.org2 directory numerous times over the past few weeks. Did you verify the package 'openoffice.org' is installed and not just that you have hardy installed? It may be that some other package in openoffice.org which is not installed by default (there are many, and they can't all fit on the hardy install cd) is needed to get the address book source to show up.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Also if you can determine what is needed to make it show up please let me know so that I can keep track of what should be added to the cd when possible.

Thanks,

Chris Cheney

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Chris - found it:

You need openoffice.org-evolution which installs:

bsh
libhsqldb-java
libjaxp1.3-java
libjline-java
libservlet2.4-java
libxalan2-java
libxerces2-java
openoffice.org-base <== should have been installed by default
openoffice.org-java-common

Following that, I now get the standard:
-Evolution
-Groupwise
-Evolution LDAP
-Other external data source

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Ok, I thought it was probably something like that, we currently can't fit any more of OOo onto the install cd so it will have various problems like what you saw.

[Jesper Krogh (jesper)]

What is the problem of just picking up the advisory locking stuff from the shared filesystem. I dont know i Windows-things supports this, but NFS does and other programs use this to avoid writing to the same files at the same time.

Nice.. easy soloution.

... admit it .. but nearly any other application works flawlessly when running multiple instances in the same $HOME under NFS.

Jesper

[Shaver (shaver)]

So what should FirefoxB do when FirefoxA has the history file locked and it wants to update it? Queue those things for later? Block the UI? How should it communicate to the calling code that the write it wanted didn't really complete? How to keep other code in that app from reading stale data?

We could litter our code with O_NONBLOCK/WOULDBLOCK checks, but that is neither easy nor nice. I don't know of other applications that store profile-like data as frequently as we do (browsing history), and manage to not interfere with other instances. If you can point us at some, we might be able to adapt their techniques.

[Jesper Krogh (jesper)]

First it would be nice to have a feeling about the magnitude of this problem. The situation you describes above will only (as far as I can see) when:
1) FirefoxA "forgets" to drop its lock, when it is done updating the file.
or
2) When a user actually are using several different physical terminals at the same time.

1) Would be a bug.. 2) might happen but the locks should only be held while doing changes to the files, so even here, the chanches of a "collision" is fairly rare.

By checking ctime on the files, other firefox instances may be able to look for changes in the files done by others.

Example code could be SQLite3 that supports running different processes updating and accessing the same file, safely changing them under concurrent load. (They have a big nice warning about broken NFS-locking on their webpage). Gnome seems to rely on NFS-filelocking that works, but given the number of NFS-servers and clients out there, there may be broken combination among. (but that is not really firefox's problem).

Jesper

[Ted Mielczarek (ted-mielczarek)]

(In reply to comment #75)
> Gnome seems to rely on NFS-filelocking that works, but given the
> number of NFS-servers and clients out there, there may be broken combination
> among. (but that is not really firefox's problem).

That's a nice theory, but are you going to answer all the fan mail we'd get when people hit that bad combination of software and their profile data gets corrupted?

[Harry-scms (harry-scms)]

It should be possible to test for broken NFS locking somehow. Are there really still a significant number of broken NFS implementations out there? In any case you could use alternate (albeit less efficient) locking mechanisms if necessary.

Realistically I don't think finding a locking mechanism is the biggest problem. I'd think it would take a massive code review to identify all the places where the code assumes it has exclusive access to the profile, and there are likely to be cases that require major changes to fix. (Remember we're not just talking about preferences and bookmarks here, it's also the cache, extensions, and I don't know what else.)

[nodata (ubuntu-nodata)]

How about locking the bookmarks and stored logins separately from the rest?

If I ssh to a box and run mozilla, it can create another history and cache for my new session if it likes.

[Jesper Krogh (jesper)]

Well.. Simple thing would improve the situation for "most users".

1) A good global lock on .mozilla (just a lock file) that would just be activated whenever writing to a file.. and remove after. (actually letting parallel firefox-instances start up). Throw a big nice warning if it hits the point.

2) Show the hostname of the host the "other" running firefox is on in the dialog that pops up. (allowing me to go directly to the workstaion and shutting it down).

Remember that status at the moment is that it is just not possible to start firefox as the same user at 2 different NFS-clients.

1) Would work flawless for people moving around between different clients, since the lock would actually only be held by the firefox running "active".

.. then it could be improved subsequently ..

[Shaver (shaver)]

I don't think it's that easy, but if it is you could write a prototype patch and some tests, and prove me wrong. I like being wrong about stuff like this!

There are a lot of broken NFS impls out there still. And AFS. History and bookmarks are in a unified store (key to a bunch of great features in FF3), so splitting them is non-trivial. Users can run multiple copies on different profiles, and a simple cp -r of the profile should suffice if you want to go there.

If nothing else, without a good set of tests for such sharing, I'd be reluctant to take such changes into the tree -- it's an uncommon scenario that wouldn't get good ambient test coverage, and breaking it would result in user dataloss rather than user inconvenience.

If such things are important to a decent number of people, especially those who are on Unix environments and therefore more technically adept than average, I would expect that someone with such environments to hand could write some good automated tests, and then on that basis a patch to decouple or lock or whatever.

(Tweaking a lock file around every write sounds like a performance disaster to me, but without a patch to test we're just throwing guesses around. Yours are based on your knowledge of your own environment. Mine are based on total ignorance of that environment, but a decade of experience with this profile code and our file layer. Only code can break the tie. :) )

[Heiny (heiny)]

(In reply to comment #75)
> First it would be nice to have a feeling about the magnitude of this problem.
> The situation you describes above will only (as far as I can see) when:
> 1) FirefoxA "forgets" to drop its lock, when it is done updating the file.
> or
> 2) When a user actually are using several different physical terminals at the
> same time.

Scenario 2 is pretty common at our site, where a we have a large number of Linux compute boxes that people ssh into from their desktop box (which may be running Windows or Linux). They launch Firefox on the compute box in order to view local (to the compute box) generated html reports. Firefox may be launched from the command line, or from a button (like "View Logs") in another GUI tool. With the current Firefox implementation, before launching users have to either (a) make sure no other instance of Firefox is running on some other box, and/or (b) copy the html files to an NFS or Samba shared directory and use an already running Firefox. This adds a lot of friction to a process that people feel ought to be very simple.

[Heiny (heiny)]

(In reply to comment #74)
> We could litter our code with O_NONBLOCK/WOULDBLOCK checks, but that is neither
> easy nor nice.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. :-)

> I don't know of other applications that store profile-like data
> as frequently as we do (browsing history), and manage to not interfere with
> other instances. If you can point us at some, we might be able to adapt their
> techniques.

I'm not sure how KDE's konqueror browser handles this situation, but it does seem to handle multiple instances running on different machines pretty well. It might be worth checking out.

[Brendan-mozilla (brendan-mozilla)]

You optimists need to go read bug 318801 and

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=229469

(from bug 318801 comment 45).

/be

[Vda-linux (vda-linux)]

> So what should FirefoxB do when FirefoxA has the history file locked and it
> wants to update it? Queue those things for later? Block the UI? How should
> it communicate to the calling code that the write it wanted didn't really
> complete? How to keep other code in that app from reading stale data?

By designing your data store to be as nonblocking as possible.

Compare mailbox (one huge file with all your mails glued together)
and maildir format.

In mailbox, deletion of one email is a blocking operation - you must
prevent other processes from sseing half-updated file, and it also
may take arbitrary amount of time (think 2GB mailbox).

Zillions of mails stored in maildir directories can be read, written,
moved, deleted etc concurrently by any number of independend processes,
even from different machines! All what is needed is atomic rename().

I agree that relying on locking is a bad idea.
Networked filesystems+locking => bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs.

[Krange (krange)]

I appreciate the network file system issues here, but I just want to bring up a simpler case where this problem rears its head.

In my case I am logging into the same machine either locally, or through various VNC connections. This causes the frustrating situation of a firefox running on display :0 preventing me from running a firefox on VNC :1 or :2, etc. That means I have to do the "killall firefox && killall firefox-bin" dance every time I try to run firefox from a different login.

Konqueror does not seem to have this problem.

In this case, there are no NFS or such issues. All of the files are local.

[Harry-scms (harry-scms)]

(In reply to comment #84)

> By designing your data store to be as nonblocking as possible.

That of course is the problem. The data store in this case has already been designed, and it wasn't designed with multiple simultaneous access in mind. Redesigning the data store would potentially affect every single line of code in the entire project, as far as I can see; it's just too big a change.

Of course I don't want to discourage anyone from trying to find a clever solution. It would be great if this could be done, I'm just not optimistic.

Perhaps an emulation layer could present most of the code with what looks like a classic profile with exclusive access while actually managing simultaneous access, maybe on a copy-on-write basis?

An initial implementation might provide limited functionality (along with a warning message) for additional instances, e.g., bookmarks, history and preferences won't be remembered; I think it would still be useful, and improvements could then be made incrementally.

[higuita (higuita)]

Seems to me that the problem is not the local file system, but network ones (nfs, afs, smbfs, cifs, etc), so why not break the problems in two?

firefox detect if the profile file system is a local fs or a network one and then:

if local, doesnt create the lock, uses the sqlite for multiple access browsers. before writing, check for the lock flag... set a minimun check interval for 10s to avoid too many checks. If lock detected, place a flag somewhere in the gui or give a warning that is running read only. this "read only" mode is the limited functionality Harry (comment #86) said.

if network file system, use the current lock system, and would block any other running instances after 10s, allowing the "network based" firefox to run and the other to run "read only"

if lock already exists, uses the current implementation: dont allow a new instance. Even better, allow the running, again, in "read only" mode

later we could allow a "take over" button, that on user decision, would allow a "read only" instance to take over the flag and start to write (again, after the 10s checkout). the take over would warn that even if several instances are running, only the "active" one could write data.

isnt perfect, but i'm sure would be enough for most people around here. the local instances would allow a user to run several browsers instances, to avoid one crash to take over all open browsers or running different version of the browser.

the network code would allow the same user to roamming machines and still have
access to the their browser.

the only problem i see is the crash recovery, but that might be another war... :)

[Sami Liedes (sliedes)]

I agree with #85. While the NFS use case may be relatively uncommon, X was _designed_ so that I can run an application remotely. In case of browsers, I really do that quite often, ssh to my box and run the browser. No NFS. I can't believe this is an uncommon thing to do (and just look at the number of Cc:s to this bug). And this is one of the main reasons why I use Konqueror, because it works as I'd expect any software to: Not break when run both locally and remotely at the same time.

I could live with separate caches and anything else for the instances, but the one thing I'd want above other things is shared bookmarks.

I don't want to sound like I'm flaming, so sorry if it sounds like that, but I can understand how this requirement is foreign to Windows users; however the fact that I can't do this is the single most obvious non-unixism in FF. It really gives the impression FF was designed for Windows and the Unix port is just a hack to get it mostly working (and I can't blame even if it was so, since the Windows market is obviously bigger by an order of magnitude; however it makes me want to resort to some other browser that I feel is designed for the needs of a Unix user).

[Vda-linux (vda-linux)]

> Seems to me that the problem is not the local file system, but network ones
> (nfs, afs, smbfs, cifs, etc), so why not break the problems in two?
>
> firefox detect if the profile file system is a local fs or a network one and
> then:
>
> if local, ...
>
> if network file system, ...

Filesystems are supposed to abstract backing store. If you are trying to "find
out whether filesystem is networked", you are doing something wrong. What next?
"Does my filesystem sit on SATA disk made by Samsung?"

Just act as if your filesystem is always networked (i.e., do not use flock()
locking, use lock files and/or atomic renames).

Apart from this, I like the proposal to make second firefox run in some sort of
"read only" mode.

[Harry-scms (harry-scms)]

(In reply to comment #87)

> [...] If lock detected, place a flag somewhere in the gui
> or give a warning that is running read only. this "read only" mode is the
> limited functionality Harry (comment #86) said.

Don't be misled into thinking this is easy. The second instance would still need to have access to a consistent profile (whether real or emulated) and to be able to write to it, even if the changes will later be discarded when the instance exits. This requires a fundamental change to the way the profile is stored on the disk; all an emulation layer might achieve is to help reduce the effort involved in modifying all the existing code that makes use of the profile.

[Mozbugs-jard (mozbugs-jard)]

This may be foreign to home Windows users, but there's an awful lot of us using Windows in networked office environments, where our home drives are on network shares, and our profiles are roaming.

In this situation leaving yourself logged into your main PC with Firefox running, and then logging into another machine on the network (as the same user) and trying to open Firefox gives the same message ("Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.").

Please don't go down a Unix-only path for fixing this...

[higuita (higuita)]

i agree that the detection of the file system type is a hack, but breaking the problem in two would help local instances, full features with multi-instances in little time. reducing all to the network FS way will take more work and so longer and with reduced funcionality.

If later the network soluction is good enough, we could remote the "local FS" hack... of course, this is just a opinion, even more as i'm not a developer, my programming skills are very basic :)

for Comment #90, of course there is a need for some sort of extra layer for the read-only mode, my idea is not block all writes, but not update the "Real" profile (and so any change is lost in the end).

my idea is, when the the profile is locked, to copy the needed files (or use a copy-on-write) to a new dir (say a folder named ip-data-time) and work over there, write and read... In the end, we could drop that folder and lose any changes.

i got another 2 ideas that might be used or not with the above idea

-sockets!! why not create a socket in the first instance and new instances would ask the first one to do the updates in their name... if needed, fork a small daemon to keep the process that do the writes simple and reliable way.
This could be the extra layer talked about.
Of course windows could be a problem, but cygwin had solved someway...

-there are several software that do the sync of several parts of the profile to a web location... why not take that idea and apply it locally?

we know the original state, the know what changed in each instance, so do a "diff" (or list actions done, no need to do a real diff) and place it in some "queue" dir with some kind of serial number.

when the normal (non-locked) instance start, would read that queue dir and try to apply the diffs/actions to the profile...
...as it was said before, bookmarks and maybe passwords and cookies are the most important things to try to keep from locked instances, all remaining probably arent worth the trouble

[Harry-scms (harry-scms)]

(In reply to comment #92)

> my idea is, when the the profile is locked, to copy the needed files (or use a
> copy-on-write) to a new dir (say a folder named ip-data-time) and work over
> there, write and read...

Probably not adequate because the profile is in use when the second instance starts, and so is not necessarily in a consistent state. The second instance needs to be able to reconstruct the profile as it was when the first instance started, or preferably as it would be if the first instance were to finish.

(Arguably this is no worse than the case in which Firefox crashes or is terminated leaving the profile potentially inconsistent, so the risk might be tolerable. However it would make it more difficult to progress the solution beyond the most primitive level.)

> -sockets!! why not create a socket in the first instance and new instances
> would ask the first one to do the updates in their name...

Wouldn't work in general across machines because of firewalls, and wouldn't really solve the underlying problem that each instance would (potentially) get confused by the changes the other was making. A more straightforward solution of this general class would be for the second instance to be a remote window of the first instance.

[higuita (higuita)]

there is a simple way of workaround it... make the first instance also copy-on-write, leaving a consistent profile and do a move/rename in the end of session. This with the a folder with the other instances actions would solve most of the problem for network people

in a manual way, this is what people really do, when we have the profile locked, we create a new profile and copy the bookmarks. we use the new profile and when needed, we copy the changes to the old profile

[Cyp (cyp)]

> in a manual way, this is what people really do, when we have the profile
> locked, we create a new profile and copy the bookmarks.

yep. Indeed thats what I do too (copy on login, copy on logout).

May I suggest using a simple redirection mechanism that simply modifies calls to open(filename) to something like...
  #1) Is there a temp copy of 'filename' yet? If not, copy over to
      tmp_profile dir.
  #2) Change open("filename") to open("tmp_profile_dir/filename")
Then, when the last instance of ff closes, move the changes to the original profile directory. No synchronization necessary, last man wins. Even this caveat would be immensely more acceptable to admins than the current state of affairs. It would be to this admin anyway. :)

The "which directory should it be" question is resolvable by either using tmp (IIRC, FF is already using LocalSettings/AppData/<whatever> under win), or by using a "virtual" disk, i.e. memory, and letting the OS figure out where to page.

[JT (spikyjt)]

I may be missing something but after installing openoffice.org-evolution, I still don't get those additional options. However personally I am after a more generic LDAP access, which is available in the standard openoffice.org-2.4 install. I downloaded the deb packages from openoffice.org and they installed fine and LDAP access works. In this case, why on earth can this not be included in the ubuntu packages? It doesn't need to be on the cd just in the repos. I also don't understand why this is priority low, when LDAP is the most common, standard address book resource. Surely this is essential?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/267824 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug.

Screenshot of standard OOo addressbook sources is attached.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Screenshot of Ubuntu 2.4.1 addressbook sources.

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 473909 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Anyone know the progress on this bug report?

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 483732 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 486749 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Dav1dblunk3tt (dav1dblunk3tt)]

This script resolves most of the problems associated with this stupid bug for me, while it doesn't fix the bug it does make using firefox on several machines sharing the same filestore possible without feeling like you have to throw the computer out of the window:

#!/bin/sh
HN=`hostname`

echo hostname set to $HN
if test -e ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host ; then
        LM=`cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host`
        echo Firefox has taken a lock out on the following machine:
        cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host
        if test $LM = $HN ; then
                echo Running a repeat firefox
                /usr/bin/firefox
                exit 0
        else
                if kdialog --yesno "Firefox is locked on machine $LM \n Do you want me to kill it?" ; then
                        echo OK I got a YES
                        ssh -o "StrictHostKeyChecking no" $LM "killall -regexp firefox"
                        kdialog --msgbox "Now try again"
                else
                        echo Ok I got a NO
                        exit 0
                        fi
                exit 0
                fi
        fi

echo No lock_host detected
echo Making lock_host
hostname > ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host
echo Running firefox
/usr/bin/firefox
echo Removing lock_host
rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host

It is a little sloppy and could be neater and could handle ssh requiring a password but it works for me.

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 486749 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[trendzetter (trendzetter)]

Ubuntu users are still out of luck

[Erdal Ronahi (erdalronahi)]

This is still present in Jaunty. Very annoying.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Upstream OpenOffice.org claims this bug cannot be fixed until mozilla-bugs #135137 is fixed.

Chris

[Flabdablet (flabdablet)]

Is LDAP address book support actually provided by Gecko, then?

[trendzetter (trendzetter)]

The bug is only present in Ubuntu. If I download openoffice from openoffice.org all options are present.
The Ubuntu version is missing addressbook options:
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

trendzetter, This bug is only present in ALL Linux distributions. Yes the bug does not show up in the upstream version because they use a really old insecure version of mozilla that Linux distributions can't use.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 06/29/2009 01:22 PM, Chris Cheney wrote:
> trendzetter, This bug is only present in ALL Linux distributions. Yes
> the bug does not show up in the upstream version because they use a
> really old insecure version of mozilla that Linux distributions can't
> use.
>

For clarification; would "ALL Linux distributions" mean the go-oo/novell
(http://www.go-oo.org/download/) packages?

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Well anyone who does not build with the old outdated copy of mozilla. But generally as far as I know all Linux distributions do that even the few that don't use go-oo.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 06/29/2009 03:06 PM, Chris Cheney wrote:
> Well anyone who does not build with the old outdated copy of mozilla.
> But generally as far as I know all Linux distributions do that even the
> few that don't use go-oo.
>

I'd recommend looking at the new versions of Thunderbird(2) and
SeaMonkey(3) which will hopefully be available in the next few months.
Perhaps you can coordinate/consult with John Vivirito who is working on
the Ubuntu mozilla packaging, or Rober Kaiser (mozilla)?

87375 seems to have turned into a 'he said'/'she said'...

Either way, a workaround of sorts should be provided if the go-oo/Ubuntu
builds won't support the address data sources. Blaming upstream builds,
which do support the data sources seems to be a stretch.

I can't do builds or code, but if there is anything that you need tested
please feel free to contact me directly. I've several 'test-only'
systems and happy to help if I can.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

On 07/01/2009 10:07 PM, NoOp wrote:
> On 06/29/2009 03:06 PM, Chris Cheney wrote:
>> Well anyone who does not build with the old outdated copy of mozilla.
>> But generally as far as I know all Linux distributions do that even the
>> few that don't use go-oo.
>>
>
> I'd recommend looking at the new versions of Thunderbird(2) and
> SeaMonkey(3) which will hopefully be available in the next few months.
> Perhaps you can coordinate/consult with John Vivirito who is working on
> the Ubuntu mozilla packaging, or Rober Kaiser (mozilla)?
>
> 87375 seems to have turned into a 'he said'/'she said'...
>
> Either way, a workaround of sorts should be provided if the go-oo/Ubuntu
> builds won't support the address data sources. Blaming upstream builds,
> which do support the data sources seems to be a stretch.
>
> I can't do builds or code, but if there is anything that you need tested
> please feel free to contact me directly. I've several 'test-only'
> systems and happy to help if I can.
>
I'm out for a while however i am looking at updating seamonkey-1.1.x and
talk to asac or fta on the tbird issue. I havent followed this bug but
will look at it in next day or 2 before updating seamonkey.

--
Sincerely Yours,
    John Vivirito

https://launchpad.net/~gnomefreak
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JohnVivirito
Linux User# 414246

"How can i get lost, if i have no where to go"
    -- Metallica from Unforgiven III

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Do we have an updated patch for this?
By the looks of this bug mail-news needs the patch, so why is firefox added onto this bug instead of SM and Tbird?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Regarding your question; I've no clue as to why Firefox is involved other than Coren's comments (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/93546/comments/18).

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=87375 evolves into an ldap and mozilla discussion, yet the original issue was that the Thunderbird address book is missing from (U)OOo +
The Ubuntu version is missing:
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book
yet they were (and still are) available in Standard OpenOffice.org OOo versions.

Chris filed a bug on OOo:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=87375
However the bug/issue in question is not with standard OOo, but with the Ubuntu/Novell/go-oo/ximian builds which are a branch of the standard OOo builds.

IMO if this were to be escalated to an upstream, it should be to go-oo ((http://www.go-oo.org/)), not OpenOffice.org. The Ubuntu OOo builds (correct me if I am wrong Chris) are built from the go-oo branch.

My suggestion of getting you involved is to to the supposed mozilla issue; if it is an issue per 87375 et al, then it is helpful for someone that is aware of the newer mozilla builds/transitions from SeaMonkey 1.1.x to 2.0 an Thunderbird 2.x to 3.x.

[Sami Liedes (sliedes)]

I see this was tagged wontfix. Any chance of at least getting firefox to work so that when I have a running instance on machine X, then I ssh to X from Y (with X11 forwarding), starting firefox from the command line with DISPLAY pointing to the forwarded X11 display, I would get a window of the *same ff instance* on the sshing machine (i.e. where DISPLAY points), not on the wrong display (i.e. DISPLAY when firefox was first started)? This is really annoying, and works for at least Konqueror btw :P

[Sami Liedes (sliedes)]

Ah, I misparsed the email. What was changed to WONTFIX was a bug this depends on. Hope that doesn't mean this will never get fixed - this seems to annoy a lot of people, just jugding from the enormous Cc: list.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

If I remember the details of this issue correctly the problem is that upstream OOo only works with the equivalent of xulrunner 1.7, though I may be misremembering as it has been a long time since I looked into this issue in detail. As far as I know this has not worked at least since before I took over OOo maintenance over 2 years ago.

Upstream OOo (Sun) doesn't seem to care about most issues including this one, they have several hundred MB of third party libraries in their source that does not belong there and generally will not fix issues to make OOo build with modern versions of the libraries. So we are stuck with bugs like this one.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 08:53:45AM -0000, Chris Cheney wrote:
> Upstream OOo (Sun) doesn't seem to care about most issues including this
> one, they have several hundred MB of third party libraries in their
> source that does not belong there and generally will not fix issues to
> make OOo build with modern versions of the libraries. So we are stuck
> with bugs like this one.

Chris, but isnt the problme here that even if we build using the old
mozilla code in their third_party dir it doesnt work for any modern
installs that dont have a thunderbird based xul 1.7?

For me this doesnt sound like: "make it work with modern libs", but
rather "make it work somehow - even if you copy another code snippet
in your third party stuff".
>

 - Alexander

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Yes, I think that is true too, but I would have to check it again.

[loeppel (loeppel)]

> Chris, but isnt the problme here that even if we build using the old
> mozilla code in their third_party dir it doesnt work for any modern
> installs that dont have a thunderbird based xul 1.7?

Sorry, but this is nonsense. If the upstream (means: sun OOo) builds works with TB 2.x (means: xul 1.8.x), builds with the source code from the third_party dir should do the same!

But i think the whole address book thing in mozilla is crap. There should be a way to read and write address book data without any hassle.

- loeppel

[Wolf Pusztay (wjp-reg)]

Totally !!

Wjp.reg

-----Original Message-----
From: <email address hidden> [mailto:<email address hidden>] On Behalf Of loeppel
Sent: August 11, 2009 3:50 PM
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 93546] Re: [upstream] Openoffice.org Address data sources missing

> Chris, but isnt the problme here that even if we build using the old
> mozilla code in their third_party dir it doesnt work for any modern
> installs that dont have a thunderbird based xul 1.7?

Sorry, but this is nonsense. If the upstream (means: sun OOo) builds
works with TB 2.x (means: xul 1.8.x), builds with the source code from
the third_party dir should do the same!

But i think the whole address book thing in mozilla is crap. There
should be a way to read and write address book data without any hassle.

- loeppel

--
[upstream] Openoffice.org Address data sources missing
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/93546
You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
of a duplicate bug.

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.5.392 / Virus Database: 270.13.49/2293 - Release Date: 08/09/09 18:10:00

[Kevin Brosnan (kbrosnan)]

*** Bug 513097 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Merlinpilot (nigel-talbot)]

Hello,

This is a rant from a potentially frustrated user of Jaunty 9.04, just installed on an ex WXP desktop following hard drive failure and replacement.

I am simply a user of computers, although don't mind delving a little to make things work. I am trying to give up Microsoft and generally find Ubuntu very good.

Some things are very frustrating though and trying to do something simple like merge addresses into OO (I want to print my Christmas Card Labels) should be straightforward.

I have just spent the best part of two days (fortunately (or unfortunately) I have the time at the moment being off work due to a car accident) to get OO Writer to see the Evolution Address Book. I finally, more by luck than judgement, found openoffice.org-java-common with the package to enable access to the Evolution Address Book - which is not installed automatically.

My question is why not install this package as part of a 9.04 installation so address book access works without the need for excessive user actions?

Also, I would prefer to use Thunderbird, but this appears not easy without spending yet more of my time on this issue.

Can I add to the debate by making a plea to sort out this fundamental issue, which is a real turn-off to using Ubuntu.

This comment is offered in the spirit of constructive criticism, and I apologise for not being able to offer anything to the technical debate.

Merlinpilot

[Philringnalda (philringnalda)]

*** Bug 536442 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 567980 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Dav1dblunk3tt (dav1dblunk3tt)]

Revised script that provides the required functionality until a proper fix is supplied.

Basically logs where firefox is running and will remotely kill ff allowing it to be restarted locally (and ff recovers the session). Requires kde / ssh keys to be setup to work.

#!/bin/sh
HN=`hostname`

echo hostname set to $HN
if test -e ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host ; then
        LM=`cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host`
        echo Firefox has taken a lock out on the following machine:
        cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host
        if [ "$LM" = "$HN" ] ; then
                echo Running a repeat firefox
                /usr/bin/firefox
                exit
        else
                #ANS=`kdialog --yesno "Firefox is locked on machine $LM \n Do you wish me to try to kill it?"`
                kdialog --yesno "Firefox is locked on machine $LM \n Do you wish me to try to kill it?"
                #ANS=$?
                #cho "Debug, ANS=$ANS"
                if [ $? = 0 ]; then
                #if test yes = $ANS ; then
                        echo "Trying to kill the remote firefox"
                        #RES=`ssh -o "StrictHostKeyChecking no" $LM "killall -regexp firefox"`
                        echo "No result" > /tmp/.netfoxsshres
                        ssh -o "StrictHostKeyChecking no" $LM "killall -regexp firefox" 2> /tmp/.netfoxsshres
                        RES=`cat /tmp/.netfoxsshres`
                        rm -f /tmp/.netfoxsshres
                        kdialog --msgbox "Result was $RES, now try again"

                        else
                                exit
                        fi
                exit
                fi
        fi

echo No lock_host detected
echo Making lock_host
touch ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host
echo $HN >> ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host
date >> ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host.log
echo $HN >> ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host.log
#uname -n > ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host

echo Running firefox
/usr/bin/firefox $1 $2 $3 $4 $5
echo Removing lock_host
rm -f ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host
date >> ~/.mozilla/firefox/lock_host.log

[Gordon Burgess-Parker (gordonbp)]

I can confirm that this bug is STILL in existence with the Ubuntu Open Office 3.2 that ships with 10.04.
Doing File-Wizard-Address Data Source there are NO address book sources available AT ALL.
If I remove the Ubuntu Open Office 3.2 and install Open Office 3.2.1 by downloading the deb files from www.openoffice.org, then executing File-Wizard-Address Book data source, everything is as it should be and Thunderbird address book(s) show up.

COME ON UBUNTU - GET IT TOGETHER. This has been going on for YEARS now.

[Alan Lord (theopensourcerer)]

I am also surprised that functionality is omitted from the Ubuntu OOo that is in the standard build.

This bug is affecting me as I do not use Evolution, but instead the far superior and cross-platform Mozilla Thunderbird.

[Gordon Burgess-Parker (gordonbp)]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 30/07/10 16:51, Alan Lord wrote:
> I am also surprised that functionality is omitted from the Ubuntu OOo
> that is in the standard build.
>
> This bug is affecting me as I do not use Evolution, but instead the far
> superior and cross-platform Mozilla Thunderbird.
>
If you remove the Ubuntu OO and replace with the current download from
openoffice.org as per these instructions:
http://www.muktware.com/news/08/2010/164
then it all works as it should do.
(Just done this....)
It's a shame that Ubuntu seem to be dragging their feet on this - this
bug has been in existence for years now and is quite important I would
have thought...

Regards

Gordon

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

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=aVxE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[NoOp (glgxg)]

The address book options are showing up in Standard OOo 3.2.1; however do you actually have any address data under the headers when you select the Thunderbird address sources? I do not with:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1
Nor with:
Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100701 Lightning/1.0b1 SeaMonkey/2.0.6
The issue is that, even though the address sources show up, mozilla are using a different database structure for addressbooks in the most recent versions.

[Gordon Burgess-Parker (gordonbp)]

On 30/07/10 22:36, NoOp wrote:
> The address book options are showing up in Standard OOo 3.2.1; however do you actually have any address data under the headers when you select the Thunderbird address sources? I do not with:
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1
> Nor with:
> Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100701 Lightning/1.0b1 SeaMonkey/2.0.6
> The issue is that, even though the address sources show up, mozilla are using a different database structure for addressbooks in the most recent versions.
>
>
Yes I do. Using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11)
Gecko/20100713 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.6 on Ubuntu 10.04
I have three Thunderbird addressbooks and they all show up in the Data
Sources Window and the addresses are all showing in the Data Sources
window in Writer...

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 07/31/2010 12:40 AM, Gordon wrote:
> On 30/07/10 22:36, NoOp wrote:
>> The address book options are showing up in Standard OOo 3.2.1; however do you actually have any address data under the headers when you select the Thunderbird address sources? I do not with:
>> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1
>> Nor with:
>> Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100701 Lightning/1.0b1 SeaMonkey/2.0.6
>> The issue is that, even though the address sources show up, mozilla are using a different database structure for addressbooks in the most recent versions.
>>
>>
> Yes I do. Using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11)
> Gecko/20100713 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.6 on Ubuntu 10.04
> I have three Thunderbird addressbooks and they all show up in the Data
> Sources Window and the addresses are all showing in the Data Sources
> window in Writer...
>

Finally got mine to show up as well in standard OOo. SeaMonkey 2.x issue
is an upstream problem:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=107809

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Moving to the new openoffice.org issue.

[Alan Lord (theopensourcerer)]

I am not sure that the openoffice.org bug & this one are the same issue.

In the Ubuntu OOo build I am not seeing any choices in the data source tools for Mozilla/Netscape/Thunderbird etc.

I do not think this the same issue as not being able to read the new address book format which came out with Thunderbird 3. I do not have any choices to even try and connect to the Thunderbird AB.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

On 08/01/2010 12:42 AM, Micah Gersten wrote:
> Moving to the new openoffice.org issue.
>
> ** Changed in: openoffice
> Status: Invalid => Unknown
>
> ** Changed in: openoffice
> Remote watch: OpenOffice.org Issue Tracker #87375 => OpenOffice.org Issue Tracker #107809
>

Micah, upstream 107809 has nothing to do with this bug. It was a comment
clarification for #166 when I mentioned that I was not able to get
adresses in SeaMonkey with standard OOo. However, if/when (U)OOo finally
add the adress data sources that are available in standard (S)OOo, then
that bug will come into play. My apologies for the noise/confusion.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

My apologies, changing the upstream issue back.

[David Burleigh (david-burleigh)]

No data sources are listed for "Address Book Type" in step 1 of the wizard.

I was hoping that the Thunderbird address book would be among the choices, but there are NO choices, and when you click on the Next button, you get an error message: "The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL."

[DrewJensen (atjensen)]

@David - Using Ubuntu 11.04 / LibO RC2 binary from the main web site AMD64
and OpenSUSE 11.3 / LibO RC2 from the suse build repos 32Bit - I see data sources at every spot I can think of where they should be.

Which distro would you be using?

[David Burleigh (david-burleigh)]

I am using Ubuntu 10.10. When I choose File/Wizards/Address Data Source, the wizard appears with four steps, the first being Address Book Type. No types are listed, but with the old OpenOffice, several options were listed, including the Thunderbird address book.

[Rene Engelhard (rene-debian)]

in case he is using the distro packages - no surprise. It is NO OPTION to use s obsolete, patched seamonkey for providing the Mozilla Adress Book stuff. It can't be built using system-mozilla and internal mozilla, well, see above. Thus it's enabled (let alone for security reasons) disabled in most distros. Besides that it will increase build time in a considerable manner, especially on slow architectures (like ARM, MIPS)

Someone, though, should fix the LDAP "adress book" thing to not require Mozillas
libldap50.so but OpenLDAP (as it's already done for the LDAP configuration backend)

[David Burleigh (david-burleigh)]

I am using Thunderbird 3.1.7 (amd64 build).

[Rene Engelhard (rene-debian)]

> I am using Thunderbird 3.1.7 (amd64 build).

and? doesn't matter. mozab is for access to Mozillas (Thunderbird, Seamonkey)-Adressbook. That doesn't have *anything* to do with what you use but
what your LibO is built with.

[David Burleigh (david-burleigh)]

Well, that doesn't tell me much, because I don't know anything about LibO. I only filed the bug report because the behavior of the wizard is not as it was with previous OpenOffice versions. If it is not really a bug, that's fine. I'd just like to be able to accomplish the same effect with LibreOffice, i.e., do a mail-merge using my Thunderbird address book as a data source.

[David Burleigh (david-burleigh)]

After I completely removed LibreOffice RC2 and then installed RC3 from the amd64 debs, the Thunderbird address book appeared among the address data source options...

[Cno (cno)]

reading the latest comment (thanks for reporting) and looking at my own system, I close this bug.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Reopening. There appears to be a regression as with:
http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/Linux_x86_Release_Configuration/libreoffice-3-4/2011-05-02_18:50:09/
$ md5sum
libreoffice-3-4~2011-05-02_18:50:09_LibO_3.4.0beta3_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
71b7f12401c0a992d88625507deb6c16
$ cat /opt/libreoffice/basis3.4/program/versionrc
[Version]
buildid=300m103(Build:3)
OOOBaseVersion=3.4
OOOPackageVersion=3.4.0
ProductBuildid=3
ProductMajor=300
ProductMinor=103
ProductSource=DEV300
Unbuntu 10.10

File|Wizards|Address Data Source
fails to open.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Added note: the wizard does work on the 64bit build, so this appears broken in the 32bit build(s).

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Sorry, correction:

Added note: the wizard does _open_ on the 64bit build, so this appears broken in the 32bit build(s). On the 64bit build selecting any of the options gives "The connection to the datasource could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL." But I suppose that should be filed as a separate bug.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

NoOp, does this issue occur for you in LibreOffice?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

It's actually gotten worse in:
OpenOffice.org 3.2.1
OOO320m19 (Build:9505)
ooo-build 3.2.1.4, Ubuntu package 1:3.2.1-7ubuntu1.

That version only shows 'Other external data source' (see the attached screenshot).

All other versions that I run:
LibreOffice 3.4.0
DEV300m103 (Build:4)
(also 3.4.0b5

OpenOffice 3.2.0
OOO330m20 (Build: 9567)
(standard OOo)

OOo-dev 3.4.0
DEV300m97 (Build: 9566)
(standard OOo)

 offer
- Mozilla / Netscape
- Thunderbird
- KDE address book
- LDAP address book
- Other external data source

[NoOp (glgxg)]

And still broken:
$ cat versionrc
[Version]
AllLanguages=en-US
BuildVersion=
buildid=300m103(Build:5)
ExtensionUpdateURL=http://updateexte.libreoffice.org/ExtensionUpdateService/check.Update
OOOBaseVersion=3.4
ProductBuildid=5
ProductMajor=300
ProductMinor=103
ProductSource=DEV300
UpdateID=LibreOffice_3_en-US
UpdateURL=
UpdateUserAgent=<PRODUCT> (${buildid}; ${_OS}; ${_ARCH}; BundledLanguages=${AllLanguages})
Vendor=The Document Foundation

(32bit & 64bit - Ubuntu 10.10)

However, attempting to connect to any of the database sources results in:

SQL Status: HY000

The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL.

and

A connection for the following URL was requested "sdbc:address:evolution:local".

[NoOp (glgxg)]

@Rene (Comment #3):
http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107809
[Bug 107809 - cannot find SeaMonkey 2.0 addressbook data source]
Status: VERIFIED FIXED

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

Apparently not fixed as confirmed by bug 37633 with 3.4rc1.

Alex

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

*** Bug 37633 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Still doesn't work in LO 3.4RC2 either:
$ cat /opt/libreoffice3.4/program/versionrc
[Version]
AllLanguages=en-US
BuildVersion=
buildid=340m1(Build:12)
ExtensionUpdateURL=http://updateexte.libreoffice.org/ExtensionUpdateService/check.Update
OOOBaseVersion=3.4
ProductBuildid=12
ProductMajor=340
ProductMinor=1
ProductSource=OOO340
UpdateID=LibreOffice_3_en-US
UpdateURL=
UpdateUserAgent=<PRODUCT> (${buildid}; ${_OS}; ${_ARCH};
BundledLanguages=${AllLanguages})
Vendor=The Document Foundation

But this has been fixed in OOo 3.4.0:
http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107809
$ cat /opt/ooo-dev/basis3.4/program/versionrc
[Version]
buildid=340m0(Build:9583)
OOOBaseVersion=3.4
OOOPackageVersion=3.4.0
ProductBuildid=9583
ProductMajor=340
ProductMinor=0
ProductSource=OOO340

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Added note: File|Wizards|Address Data Source| *does* work in LO 3.4.0RC2 Windows. Tested on WinXP
LibreOffice 3.4.0
OOO340m1 (Build:12)
Working.

Failure to connect to data sources (linux) is IMO a blocker. Mailmerge, Base, Envelopes, and Labels rely on the ability to connect to a data source. OOo 3.4 have resolved this issue so the basic build code must be available to resolve in LO as well.

[Tlillqvist-k (tlillqvist-k)]

Can you help in finding the fix from the OOo 3.4.0 code then?

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

(In reply to comment #18)
> Can you help in finding the fix from the OOo 3.4.0 code then?

@Tor

It is probably in m106 - a lot of fixes that were dba related went in there. The question is, have we merged from that yet, and if so, were the fixes for the dba part accepted into master ?

Alex

[Pmladek-y (pmladek-y)]

It affects functionality used by rather enterprise users. It can't block the 3.4.0 release => lovering the severity a bit.

Though, it is something that we should fix for 3.4.1 or 3.4.2 => I am going to list it in most annoying bugs.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

@Tor:
<http://eis.services.openoffice.org/EIS2/cws.ShowCWS?Id=9696&OpenOnly=false&TasksInline=false&Section=Files>
Taskid: i107809
connectivity source/drivers/mozab/bootstrap/MNSFolders.cxx 2de7a494abdf Frank Schoenheit [fs] i107809
connectivity source/drivers/mozab/bootstrap/MNSFolders.hxx 2de7a494abdf Frank Schoenheit [fs] i107809
connectivity source/drivers/mozab/bootstrap/MNSProfileDiscover.cxx 2de7a494abdf Frank Schoenheit [fs] i107809
connectivity source/drivers/mozab/bootstrap/MNSProfileDiscover.hxx 2de7a494abdf Frank Schoenheit [fs] i107809
connectivity source/drivers/mozab/mozab.xcu 2de7a494abdf Frank Schoenheit [fs] i107809
connectivity source/drivers/mozab/mozab2.xcu 2de7a494abdf Frank Schoenheit [fs] i107809
would be my guess according to:
http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107809
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.4beta.html

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

And yet strangely enough, that code wasn't integrated into the LibO git tree despite it being from the OOom93 milestone integrated into the OOo master on 07/10/2010 ??

Alex

[NoOp (glgxg)]

@Alex: no clue. I'm a user only.

[Tlillqvist-k (tlillqvist-k)]

That CWS *is* in our tree, in 3.4. See for instance http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/libs-core/commit/?id=a70df88b2c909228eef492da32672149b808eb48 .

There is something else going on.

[Libreoffice-z (libreoffice-z)]

RC2 is bit by bit identical with release version, so separate items in the version picker are useless. Changes have been discussed with Michael Meeks.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Not working:
$ cat /opt/libreoffice3.4/basis3.4/program/versionrc
[Version]
buildid=340m1(Build:103)
OOOBaseVersion=3.4
OOOPackageVersion=3.4.1
ProductBuildid=103
ProductMajor=340
ProductMinor=1
ProductSource=OOO340

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Working in:
$ cat /opt/libreoffice/program/versionrc
[Version]
AllLanguages=en-US
buildid=330m19(Build:301)
ExtensionUpdateURL=http://updateexte.libreoffice.org/ExtensionUpdateService/check.Update
OOOBaseVersion=3.3
ProductBuildid=301
ProductMajor=330
ProductMinor=19
ProductSource=OOO330
UpdateID=LibreOffice_3_en-US
UpdateURL=
UpdateUserAgent=<PRODUCT> (${buildid}; ${_OS}; ${_ARCH}; BundledLanguages=${AllLanguages})

with the exception of the Mozilla/Netscape connector (OOo-dev 3.4 works with SeaMonkey).

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Not working in:
[Version]
AllLanguages=en-US
BuildVersion=
buildid=340m1(Build:202)
ExtensionUpdateURL=http://updateexte.libreoffice.org/ExtensionUpdateService/check.Update
OOOBaseVersion=3.4
ProductBuildid=202
ProductMajor=340
ProductMinor=1
ProductSource=OOO340
UpdateID=LibreOffice_3_en-US
UpdateURL=
UpdateUserAgent=<PRODUCT> (${buildid}; ${_OS}; ${_ARCH}; BundledLanguages=${AllLanguages})
Vendor=The Document Foundation

(Linux 32bit)

[Cno (cno)]

.

[julien2412 (serval2412-6)]

On LO master repo (so future 3.5), it seems to work.
No warning or debug message (I use debug mode) when I open wizard.
I attached a screenshot.

Hope I haven't completely misunderstood the bug.

[julien2412 (serval2412-6)]

Created attachment 51219
Screenshot which show address book in Writer

[julien2412 (serval2412-6)]

(In reply to comment #30)
> On LO master repo (so future 3.5), it seems to work.
> No warning or debug message (I use debug mode) when I open wizard.
> I attached a screenshot.
>
> Hope I haven't completely misunderstood the bug.
I just forgot to say :
- I'm on debian x86 and I compiled with gcc (Debian 4.6.1-4) 4.6.1
- I just updated and compiled my repository (which points on master) today

[julien2412 (serval2412-6)]

Just to say it works on Windows 7, 3.4.3, OOO340m1 (Build:302).
Either I understood nothing at all concerning this bug or we can consider it now as resolved.

[promeneur (epistemepromeneur)]

Mandriva 2010.2 32 bit
libreoffice 3.4.2 OOO340m1 build 302

i confirm the bug

in lo base
i created a db file for my kab (kde addressbook)
the kab.odb seems filled (1,6 ko)

in lo writer
in file > model > address book source
in "data source" field it appears in the list
i can select it
but
when i select it have the error message about no sdbc driver

i can't access to the address book

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

(In reply to comment #34)
> Mandriva 2010.2 32 bit
> libreoffice 3.4.2 OOO340m1 build 302
>
> i confirm the bug
>

Well thank you, but it has been reported as fixed on master, and so therefore may or may not be backported for 3.4.4 (not my decision).

I will try this again on one of my own recent Linux 32bit master builds and see if I confirm Julien's findings.

Alex

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

(In reply to comment #35)

>
> Well thank you, but it has been reported as fixed on master, and so therefore
> may or may not be backported for 3.4.4 (not my decision).
>
> I will try this again on one of my own recent Linux 32bit master builds and see
> if I confirm Julien's findings.
>
>

Replying to myself :
On my own week-old 32bit linux Ubuntu build from master, I can see various choices for existing database connections, among which Thunderbird and Seamonkey address books. The ODB file can be created just fine, however, the wizard does not pick up the user's TB/SM profile, and thus can not actually make the connection to the mozab underlying database file.

Even if I save the ODB file, re-open and then try and reset the properties of the ODB connection to point to the mab file, this still fails to work. So as far as I'm concerned, my tests were inconclusive. I can't tell whether it is a problem in the connectivity code or somewhere else, because there is not much point in listing the available types of database if LibO can not actually connect to them.

Alex

[borutj (borut-jereb)]

Created attachment 52636
Address Data Source choices

[borutj (borut-jereb)]

Ubuntu 11.10
libreoffice 3.4.3

When I want to use
File --> Wizards --> Address Data Source
I have no possibilities to choose an usual database except the choice to open External Data Source. After choosing the only possibilities (External Data Source) I get the error:

The error report is:

SQL Status: HY000

The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL.

On the other hand I have some databases in my libreoffice repository.

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

(In reply to comment #38)

Hi,

> Ubuntu 11.10
> libreoffice 3.4.3
>
> When I want to use
> File --> Wizards --> Address Data Source
> I have no possibilities to choose an usual database except the choice to open
> External Data Source. After choosing the only possibilities (External Data
> Source) I get the error:
>
> The error report is:
>
> SQL Status: HY000
>
> The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC
> driver was found for the given URL.
>
> On the other hand I have some databases in my libreoffice repository.

I can confirm this too on 32bit Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 with distrib supplied LO 3.4.3, so the fix is still not in for that version.

Alex

[Cno (cno)]

No problem in 3.4.3 and 3.4.4 and a masterbuild for 3.5

So probably a bug for the "32bit Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 with distrib supplied LO
3.4.3" ??

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

Confirming bug also in distrib supplied :

LibreOffice 3.4.4
OOO340m1 (Build:402)

Ubuntu 11.10 32bit

So would this be one for Bjoern ?

Alex

[David Sterratt (david-c-sterratt)]

(In reply to comment #40)
> No problem in 3.4.3 and 3.4.4 and a masterbuild for 3.5

This is still definitely a problem for me on Ubuntu 11.10 i686 with the latest official libreoffice binaries. Steps to reproduce:

1. Purge ubuntu libreoffice packages with dpkg --purge --force-all "libreoffice*"
2. Install 3.5.0beta0 binaries from libreoffice.org.
3. rm -Rf ~/.libreoffice
4. Open /opt/libreoffice3.5/program/soffice
5. Open "File->Wizards->Address Data Sources..."
6. There are four sources presented (Mozilla/Netscape, Thunderbird, LDAP and Other external data source)
7. Select any of these. A dialogue appears saying "The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SBDC driver was found for the given URL"
8. Click on "More" in this box. The error shown is "SQL Status: HY000. The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL."
9. Click on "Information". The description is "A connection for the following URL was requested "sdbc:address:evolution:local".

From the comments above it looks as though I'm going to have to use OpenOffice to use my evolution address book to print out year's Christmas card labels...

[David Sterratt (david-c-sterratt)]

I've tried OpenOffice.org and it doesn't work either. When running from the command line I got an error "Can find no compliant libebook client libraries". Googling this lead me to the following file (in OOo):

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/trunk/main/connectivity/source/drivers/evoab2/EApi.cxx

and its equivalent in LibreOffice:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/connectivity/source/drivers/evoab2/EApi.cxx

The error occurs in EApiInit(). The reason for this is that it can't find a version of libebook on my system that matches one of the following, defined at the top of the file:

static const char *eBookLibNames[] = {
    "libebook-1.2.so.10", // bumped again
    "libebook-1.2.so.9", // evolution-2.8
    "libebook-1.2.so.5", // evolution-2.4 and 2.6+
    "libebook-1.2.so.3", // evolution-2.2
    "libebook.so.8" // evolution-2.0
};

I have libebook-1.2.so.12 installed in my system, which doesn't match any of the above. I suppose we could just try adding libebook-1.2.so.12 to the list to see what happens.

When (if) I've a moment, I'll try recompiling libreoffice, but I don't know how long it will take on my laptop...

[NoOp (glgxg)]

I have:
$ locate libebook
/usr/lib/libebook-1.2.so.9
/usr/lib/libebook-1.2.so.9.3.1

$ ls -al /usr/lib/libebook-1.2.so.9
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2011-01-20 19:49 /usr/lib/libebook-1.2.so.9 -> libebook-1.2.so.9.3.1

and have the issue in 3.4.3. Address selections are available, but clicking on any of them results in:
SQL Status: HY000

The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL.

A connection for the following URL was requested "sdbc:address:evolution:local

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Correction:

and have the issue in 3.4.3.

should read:

and have the issue in 3.4.4

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Created attachment 54439
LO3.5 screenshot

Same issue with:
LibreOffice 3.5.0
Build ID: ef91e38-b1d4df6-090bcba-45cf606-05891e7

Screenshot attached.

[David Sterratt (david-c-sterratt)]

@NoOp: that's what I saw on 3.5.0beta0 too. Interesting that it's not just a problem with the library version being wrong.

I've compiled libreoffice with
"libebook-1.2.so.12"
added to eBookLibNames. Now I only get the option of the "External data sources" and when I click on that I get the same error as you, with the Information that "A connection for the following URL was requested "sdbc:address:evolution:local"."

I think the problem may the recent changes in the libebook library. See the list of deprecated symbols at:
http://developer.gnome.org/libebook/3.2/

The file
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/connectivity/source/drivers/evoab2/EApi.h
seems to use a lot of these deprecated symbols.

I've love to have the time-expertise to hack around, but I don't. I'm going to have to move to good old-fashioned handwriting for my Christmas card envelopes.

[David Sterratt (david-c-sterratt)]

The OpenOffice version of this bug:
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=116901

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

Confirming on my 3.5 build from master Linux Ubuntu 32bit, that only 1 entry is present when the wizard is started "Other external data source".

If I click Next after having chosen this possibility, I get an error messsage of the type : "The connection could not be established. No SDBC driver could be found."

So confirming other peoples findings too.

Build ID:
87ca88c-d46295c-6e20485-4c1bcb5-libreoffice-3-5-branch point

This really needs sorting out.

Alex

[NoOp (glgxg)]

@David re comment #47:

"I've love to have the time-expertise to hack around, but I don't. I'm going to
have to move to good old-fashioned handwriting for my Christmas card envelopes."

Try this workaround: In Writer select the data sources (F4). Right-click in the data source (where Bibliography is) and select 'Registered databases'. Click 'New' and browse to where your existing .odb is located. Select the .odb & click OK. Verfify that it works by selecting the database and viewing Tables. If so, from there you should be able to File|New|Label|Labels|Database and select the database that you just added. Note: I can't get File|New|Label to work from Writer, I have to go back to the main menu and select it from there. But I reckon that's another bug report...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jbf-faure-9 (jbf-faure-9)]

*** Bug 45157 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

In my latest build from master, on Ubuntu Oneiric, I have several entries, including Evolution, Evolution (LDAP), other DB, but NO Thunderbird (which is most annoying, but not really surprising since I disabled building mozab within my build because it doesn't build within the LO code on Ubuntu (sigh).

However, the basic functionality of the Address Database Source Wizard does work. For example, I could set up and define a mysql database as an Address Datasource, just as I could with the Evolution address book.

So, FWIW, this works for me (apart from TB Address book integration) on Linux 32bit Ubuntu Oneiric with my build from master.

Alex

[Matti-mversen (matti-mversen)]

*** Bug 728941 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport . If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[tellapu (tellapu)]

I hoped that LibreOffice 3.5.1 would solve the problem, but after an upgrade from 3.4 in Ubuntu Oneric 11.10 (64-Bit) the same problem persists.
No entries available, I would need to have access to the evolution addressbook. I get the following error and information:
SQL Status: HY000
The connection to the external data source could not be established. No SDBC driver was found for the given URL.

A connection for the following URL was requested "sdbc:address:evolution:local".

It is encouraging that the importance has been raised to critical and I hope that somebody will be assigned for LO (ubuntu) soon. Thanks for working on this. I need the feature desperately.

[Libreoffice-z (libreoffice-z)]

Reduced severity.

As it seems NoOp reproduced with LibO vanilla build 3.4.0beta3, so together with other confirming comments I believe we can this one take as NEW, also due to other builds.

3.4 lifecycle is terminated, so shift to “Bug 37361 LibreOffice 3.5 most annoying bugs”

@All:
Is my addition to summary line correct?

@Alex:
Can you please keep at it and check whether the "fix" is enduring?

@Lionel:
Any ideas? This one seems to be really tricky, I see several conflicting observations.

[Mike-stewart (mike-stewart)]

For goodness sake. TEN YEARS and an issue is still "new". In a commercial environment someone would be sacked.

You cant run Firefox in a remote desktop session or under Citrix if another session already has Firefox open. This is a pretty big defect.

Frankly, this is the achilles heel of "community" software. Lots of voluntary work on building a Ferrari ... but because it is not managed as a consumer product ... you cant drive it on Sundays between 2 and 3pm.

The thing that really ticks me off after 20 years in the industry is techs nodding their heads and saying "yep, that's to be expected". Sorry, just because you can come up with an explanation doesn't mean "its OK".

Any workaround is better than closing umpteen "duplicates" and leaving an issue open for 10 years. Come back in 2050 and this will probably still be open.

Am I really the only one who is ashamed to say I'm a software developer? This is exactly the sort of thing that sees software guys get mocked by business people (well actually anyone for that matter)... and fair enough too.

Firefox as a browser is in my opinion the best (except for this particular problem) ... all the man hours that some extremely talented and selfless people have put into the tool is amazing .. only to be let down by a failure to look at the whole... as a tool used by people ... to address real usability issues ... which after all is the point.

Do you know that in real engineering disciplines people construct whole buildings? that stay standing? that can be used all year round? That take technology and engineering and apply it to _people_? that can be constructed in days? to budget?!! ... such a revolutionary concept.

While "db" has been very generous with his time to provide his script I don't think this will help my grandmother.

Yep, Im an angry old man .. the thing that makes me a sad old man is that this sort of failure is why open source and community software hasn't quite conquered the world how many predicted. Instead a commercial layer appears in between .. a layer that "tweaks" all the effort of selfless individuals to get to an actual product that delivers... and that commercial layer then chuckles it all the way back to the bank.

[RamonS (ramons)]

Mike S - Not disagreeing a bit. There are also other significant flaws in FF4 and up (dysfunctional default UI, rapid release cycle, the 'fix' for bug 586234, inability to clone a tab).
I don't think it is necessarily a reflection on all software developers, not even on all who work on FF. My guess is - and that is true for commercial software as well - some folks with a far too big ego make the decisions and they want things to be their way. The UI change that nobody wanted - still there. The rapid releases that still break add-ons and that caused hundred thousands of complaints - still there. All the stuff that works fine in FF3.x and was broken for no reason in FF4 - still there. I think that up until FF3 Mozilla was close to the community of users and made a browser that users loved. Then something changed, a decision was made to copy Chrome and entirely ignore the wishes of the user community. What Mozilla needs to do is replace the decision makers with folks that care about the users more than themselves. FF turned into the materialized ego trip of a select few and the result is unhappy users and continuously dropping market share. I really wonder how the decisions are made which bugs to fix first after covering security issues. My guess is that new (and buggy) features trumps fixing bugs filed a decade ago. And the memory leaks are still there, but that is a common occurrence in FF since version 1.

As far as sharing a profile is concerned, I think that it is even more a need for Thunderbird. You wrote that you are a developer. I know it is a common response that gets used too often, but maybe you can take on this issue and fix it? I wish I could, but I am just a QA buff and a regular user aka someone who the FF folks give a damn about.

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Who's idea was it to feed upstream bug comments into this launchpad bug report?
Firefox (Bug 135137 - Profile data cannot be shared by multiple running instances. ) has absolutely *nothing* to do with this bug report.
And BTW: address data sources are working in the non-Ubuntu version of LibreOffice:
LibreOffice 3.5.3.2
Build ID: 235ab8a-3802056-4a8fed3-2d66ea8-e241b8

[Lionel Elie Mamane (lionel-mamane)]

Summary:

 - May be related to 32 bits / 64 bits; works on 64 bits, fails on 32 bits.
 - May be related to version of libebook installed and deprecated / removed symbols; see comment 47.

Any future testers, please *always* say whether you use 32 bits or 64 bits, and what libebook-*.so* you have on your system. Thanks for that.

[Nv4y-robert (nv4y-robert)]

Tried to connect KDE-Adressbook.
OpenSuSE 11.4, 32bit, LO 3.3.4 and LO 3.5.4.2 → connection works, no content is shown (may be another problem).
OpenSuSE 12.1, 64bit, LO 3.5.4.2 → no SDBC-Driver for URL. When I search for more Information the URL "sdbc:address:kab" was not found. I think it could not be found, because the right URL has to be "sdbc:kab". Thats the URL I see, when I open Extras → Options →LibreOffice Base → Connections.

Robert

[tellapu (tellapu)]

Hi NoOp (glgxg)! Your comment regarding address data sources is very interesting. How did you uninstall the official Libre office (12.04) and install the non-Ubuntu version of LibreOffice? (I run Ubuntu 12.04 (AMD64) with LibreOffice 3.5.3.2).
Thanks.

[Lionel Elie Mamane (lionel-mamane)]

(In reply to comment #56)

> When I search for more Information the URL "sdbc:address:kab" was not found.
> I think it could not be found, because the right URL has to be "sdbc:kab".
> Thats the URL I see, when I open
> Extras → Options →LibreOffice Base → Connections.

I think "sdbc:address:kab" is the right one.

I don't see either in my (the default) "Extras → Options →LibreOffice Base → Connections".

[Lionel Elie Mamane (lionel-mamane)]

(In reply to comment #56)
> Tried to connect KDE-Adressbook.
> OpenSuSE 11.4, 32bit, LO 3.3.4 and LO 3.5.4.2 → connection works

OK, as we have reports that:

 - it works on 32 bits
 - does not work on 32 bits

I'm going to assume this is *not* related to 32/64 bits.

More fundamentally, I have the impression we are mixing several different bugs here:

1) Do the right options appear in the "Address Book Data Source" wizard?

2) Do these options work as expected?

Each missing, and each not-working option could be a *different* bug. One of these multiple bugs could be linked to 32/64 bits.

Especially, the libebook discussion should be relevant *only* to "does Evolution appear in the list / work", and not to any other entry.

Wrt to 1):

1.1) evolution missing: duh... Not enabled in our builds :-|

In my testing (my libreoffice-3-6 development tree and LibreOffice 3.6.1.1 official amd64 .debs on Debian amd64 with package libebook-1.2-12 version 3.2.2-3, file /usr/lib/libebook-1.2.so.12), I have:

Mozilla / Netscape
Thunderbird/Icedove
LDAP
Other

The first two don't work, saying that no address book directory is available. As this is very well possible (I don't use any of these programs), this does not necessarily indicate a bug.

LDAP: seems to work, don't have an actual LDAP server to completely test.

Other: seems to work, did not go all the way to a connection

I don't have KDE address book listed: duh, I don't have KDE installed.

I don't have evolution address book listed: I don't use Evolution, so maybe not a bug. Maybe still a bug.

So I'm sending this back to QA:

1) Please open a new bug for each separate issue, and include me in CC

2) Make it a blocker of this bug

3) include exact reproduction instructions on what is needed
   on a fresh system to create said Address Book
   before LibreOffice is supposed to be able to use it:

   a) install what program
      (please not "all of KDE" or something like that)
   b) do what in that program to create a new address book and
      a few entries in it, ...

   Also include exact settings (if any) needed in LibreOffice
   (e.g. LDAP connection string, BaseDN, ...)

   If needs connection to a server, try to find
   a publicly available server.
   E.g. for LDAP, the Debian LDAP directory may do (I don't know).

If the issue is "all entries missing" (or "all except Other"), that's probably a single issue. Don't open a bug per missing entry. But if *some* are missing, probably multiple issues (exception: Evolution, Groupwise and Evolution LDAP are served by the same driver, so if all three are missing,l it is a single issue).

Same for "some/all not working".

[Iplaw67 (iplaw67)]

(In reply to comment #58)

> In my testing (my libreoffice-3-6 development tree and LibreOffice 3.6.1.1
> official amd64 .debs on Debian amd64 with package libebook-1.2-12 version
> 3.2.2-3, file /usr/lib/libebook-1.2.so.12), I have:
>
> Mozilla / Netscape
> Thunderbird/Icedove
> LDAP
> Other

> The first two don't work, saying that no address book directory is available.
> As this is very well possible (I don't use any of these programs), this does
> not necessarily indicate a bug.
>

For me, I can set up and connect to a TB addressbook via the method you describe, ie. via the wizard, on master build from 30/08 64bit, so Thunderbird as an address datasource WFM.

Alex

[David Ostrovsky (d-ostrovsky)]

FYI i am working on Thunderbird Address Book (mork) driver implementation that doesn't depend on any mozilla code.

It based on the open source mork driver implementation. For the details check the https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51004. You can check the code (and contribuite ;-) on the LO feature branch: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/connectivity/source/drivers/mork?h=feature/mork

Currently it can already import the deafult AddressBook. And almoust the whole range of SQL query constructs is supported (compared to mozilla based implementation).

The plans are: merge that feature branch to master and ship that implementation with LO 3.7 on all not windows platforms
(windows would still depend on mozilla because it is uses it also for outlook and outlook express)

[David Ostrovsky (d-ostrovsky)]

the fix is commited on master

[Michael Meeks (michael-meeks)]

Any more joy in finding / splitting out the component parts of this multi-issue bug ? if not perhaps closing it would provoke filing separate bugs for any remaining issues ?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

Ubuntu 12.04 (no distro versions of LO - all are direct LO .deb's)

LibreOffice 3.5.7.1
Build ID: 3fa2330-e49ffd2-90d118b-705e248-051e21c
Works for me, for the most part[1]
o Mozilla/Netscape
o Thunderbird/Icedove
o LDAP address data
o Other external data source
 - JDBC
 - Oracle JDBC
 - KDE Address Book
 - LDAP Address Book
 - SeaMonkey Address Book
 - Thunderbird/Icedove Address Book
 - Spreadsheet
 - dBASE
 - Text
 - MySQL (JDBC)
 - My SQL (Native)
 - My SQL (ODBC)
 - ODBC
 - PostgreSQL

Version 3.6.2.2 (Build ID: da8c1e6)
Works for me, for the most part[1]
o Evolution
o Groupwise
o Evolution LDAP
o Mozilla/Netscape
o Thunderbird/Icedove
o LDAP address data
o Other external data source
 - dBASE
 - JDBC
 - Groupwise
 - Evolution LDAP
 - KDE Address Book
 - LDAP Address Book
 - SeaMonkey Address Book
 - Thunderbird/Icedove Address Book
 - Spreadsheet
 - dBASE (again - don't know why it's listed twice)
 - Text
 - MySQL (JDBC)
 - My SQL (Native)
 - My SQL (ODBC)
 - ODBC
 - PostgreSQL
@Lionel: Evolution does indeed work just fine for me.

I no longer get "No SDBC driver was found".

[1] There is an issue with the Mozilla/Netscape/SeaMonkey/Thunderbird connections. I have both SeaMonkey (my primary) and Thunderbird. Both are direct Mozilla installs (non-distro) & the profiles reside in normal:
~/.mozilla/seamonkey
~/.thunderbird
However, LO defaults to the SeaMonkey address book when Thunderbird/Icedove is selected. But of course that is for bug report other than this one.

Regarding mixes of LO distro issues: It would simplify things greatly if those issues remain in the distro's reporting system (e.g., launchpad etc). The Ubuntu launchpad issue is:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/93546>
[Address data sources missing] Note this bug report was originally reported by me a few years ago on Ubuntu's OOo. Unfortunatly, that bug report has been intermixed with this one so much that I gave up on it some time ago.

[Lionel Elie Mamane (lionel-mamane)]

(In reply to comment #60)
> Any more joy in finding / splitting out the component parts of this
> multi-issue bug ?

You are right, there was enough time for that to happen, now closing.

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

as per #215 fixed in upstream 3.5 and later (so precise and later).

[Mozaic (mozaic)]

Ist's on LibreOffice 4.0 note:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Base
" On all non-Windows platforms a new mork driver implementation is used to access Thunderbird address book. This means that Debian/Ubuntu users can finally integrate LO with their Thunderbird address book. (Debian/Ubuntu distros are not shipping a Mozilla-based mork driver, therefore their native Base package can not access the address book.) This also fixes some really old bugs for different distros. (David Ostrovsky)

For more information please see: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51004 "

[NoOp (glgxg)]

@Björn re: 249:

You've obviously not tried nor tested with
LibreOffice 3.5.7.2
Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)
This product was supplied by The Document Foundation, Debian and Ubuntu.

have you?

[NoOp (glgxg)]

LO(U)3.5.7.2 screenshot