Note data loss with Tomboy sync to Ubuntu One, for notes created in Gnote

[Sandy Armstrong]

Binary package hint: tomboy

All versions of Tomboy prior to 1.4.2 are susceptible to this bug:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632535

Due to an error in a regex in Tomboy's web sync add-in, notes created in Gnote may send blank content to Ubuntu One or other web sync servers like Snowy. This could ultimately lead to data loss, if the user expects that a clean Tomboy sync'd to U1 will get all notes with their full content.

I highly recommend that Tomboy is upgraded to 1.4.2 in Maverick, and 1.2.2 in Lucid. Both of these stable bugfix releases were made to provide a fix for this bug to distros.

If you prefer to patch the fix in, the relevant commit is here:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/tomboy/commit/?h=gnome-2-32&id=c59c716ddc6b4a2be0118d88bfd0b98103e617b0

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

To be absolutely clear, this bug impacts Tomboy 1.0 (Karmic), 1.2 (Lucid), and 1.4 (Maverick).

If Karmic and Lucid are still being maintained, I recommend those packages get the fix as well, though I only did an official upstream tarball release for 1.2.x, 1.4.x, and 1.5.x (development series).

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Accepted tomboy into lucid-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Accepted tomboy into maverick-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

Just to be clear, is Karmic not going to get an update?

If not, I'd just like to point out that we have stable upstream 1.4.2 packages for Karmic in the Tomboy PPA here:

https://launchpad.net/~tomboy-packagers/+archive/stable

Karmic ships with 1.0.x, so this is a more significant upgrade than simply applying the patch that fixes this bug.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

I am going to look at karmic, just didn't have an environment handy to test it this morning.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

I have uploaded the fix to karmic-proposed as well.

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

Thanks Ken! This is really great news.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

For the record, I have prepared a 1.5.2 package for Debian, and will thereafter merge it into Natty.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

btw, I see no test case for the SRU...

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

I don't know what the SRU requires, but the commit contains a unit test case that fails before the patch, and the upstream bug contains an attached note that syncs with no content.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Hi,

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 02:53:07AM -0000, Sandy Armstrong wrote:
>I don't know what the SRU requires, but the commit contains a unit test
>case that fails before the patch, and the upstream bug contains an
>attached note that syncs with no content.

Yeah, I was referring purely to the SRU process here. Usually a test
case is required before an SRU is accepted, but that doesn't seem to
have happened here. At any rate, it'd be good to have one so that it
can be verified. (Not asking you to provide this, Sandy)

Cheers,
Iain

[Jonathan Riddell (jr)]

Accepted into karmic-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

To test this, you need to have tomboy configured to either sync to U1 or Snowy. Here are the steps:

 * Save http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=172702 to ~/.local/share/tomboy/
   * This note contains the extra attributes that triggered the bug
 * initiate a sync
 * Look online to verify the contents of the new note, it should be titled "braham farm" and contain a link.

To test for regressions, simply create a new note with any content and initiate a sync. Verify online that the content matches.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package tomboy - 1.4.2-0ubuntu1

---------------
tomboy (1.4.2-0ubuntu1) maverick-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream stable release
    * Fix data loss bug, triggered by syncing a note that has been editted by
      gnote (LP: #666511)
    * Fix formatting in sync-setup page and broken link in sync.page that
      links to sync-setup.page.
 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:52:57 -0400

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Any testers for the karmic proposed update?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Ken, please fix this ASAP in Natty as well. Thanks!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

As there was no feedback at all for the karmic/lucid proposed packages, I removed the karmic-proposed package from the archive again.

Any testers on lucid? If not, I'll remove the lucid-proposed version as well soon, as we need to clean up -proposed for the 10.04.2 release. Thanks!

[Iain Lane (laney)]

This has been fixed in N for a while, and I've just done verification for Lucid.

For future SRUs, /please/ do include a test case; this was harder to verify than it needed to be.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package tomboy - 1.2.2-0ubuntu1

---------------
tomboy (1.2.2-0ubuntu1) lucid-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream stable release
    * Fix data loss bug, triggered by syncing a note that has been editted by
      gnote (LP: #666511)
 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:46:59 -0400

[Kate Stewart (kate.stewart)]

Just cleaning up the bug status to reflect that Ken VanDine handled it, see launchpad janitor reference