On Thursday 10 May 2007 04:24, Kay Ramme - Sun Germany - Hamburg wrote:
> Hal,
>
> Hal Vaughan wrote:
> > On Thursday 10 May 2007 03:12, Kay Ramme - Sun Germany - Hamburg 
wrote:
> >> Hi guys,
> >>
> >> if you are stumbling over deadlocks in OOo, it would be nice if
> >> you can submit issues for that, ideally with some tests to
> >> reproduce it and some stacktraces. If I remember correctly, there
> >> is already a tool coming with OOo, which allows to kill it while
> >> sending stacks at the same time.
> >
> > Unfortunately, it's not happening on my systems anymore, it's
> > happening on my customer's systems and that's not a situation where
> > I can go through that.  This doesn't happen often, but it was
> > starting to happen to one client on Windows XP and she had to
> > reboot every time she wanted to run my app.  I have to set up a
> > kill method first, then some VERY major programming to handle tasks
> > that, at this time, take me days to do.
>
> If you see a way to do so, please submit issues. Feel free to assign
> these to me first ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), I am going to dispatch these
> to the rights owners than. By the way, using multiple clients at the
> same time likely leads to deadlocks / crashes, because of issues in
> OOos implementation relative to multi-threading.

I've wondered if it might be a multiple clients issue (and here it makes 
it hard to keep track, since we're talking about server/clients and my 
business clients, so I'll use "client apps" to refer to the non-human 
one).  Basically this is not a program people will keep on in the 
background.  It runs, does it's thing, then exits.  When it's done, as 
I said, it checks a flag to see if OOo was running when it started.  If 
not, it kills OOo through the API.  If OOo was running, it cleans up 
and exits properly.  Most of the time there's never been a problem, but 
it started showing up with one user after a while.

I've wondered if, for some reason, the old instance of the client app 
was not releasing, but the log files show it was.

I think I'm going to handle this by writing a routine that will kill 
OOo.  When my app first starts, it'll try an immediate connection with 
OOo.  If it doesn't get it, it'll run OOo and wait.  If, after a 
certain length of time, it doesn't get a connection, then it'll kill 
any instance of OOo and try again.  At the end, it'll release it and if 
it was supposed to end OOo, it'll also terminate it with Taskkill.

The only situation that doesn't cover is checking to see if everything 
is okay if OOo was already running and is left running at the end.  I 
could try getting another connection and releasing it to be sure, but 
that gets redundant.

I appreciate your offer and will make sure, in the future, that I do 
assign any bugs I report to you directly.  I don't think you'll see any 
for a while, since the programming I need to do limits my time so much 
that, for now, the only use of OOo is generally for the app I'm working 
with, which means I'm essentially doing only a few limited things over 
and over.  When I have time to get back to writing screenplays, I'll be 
developing a number of specialized macros and working with margin 
changing and other things that I'll be using in ways most people either 
don't use as often as I need to do or don't use in the way I do.  When 
I'm doing that, I'll certainly be watching for bugs.

> > On another note, I have tried to report a couple issues in the
> > past. One was in Writer and it was closed because it could not be
> > reproduced for presentations.  The other was a serious issue about
> > importing documents.  In that one I was totally blown off and I
> > felt some of the comments bordered on rude.
>
> I am sorry for that. Rude comments etc. are certainly _not_
> acceptable at all. If you point to me to the issues, I take a look.

I'd have to search for them.  One, the issue I had in Writer, seems to 
be fixed now, in spite of the weak troubleshooting and the other was 
taken care of with the Word Perfect import margin, which came along a 
few years later.

> > I'm really loathe to turn in bug reports at this point.  I've
> > helped with the community before while working out macros and macro
> > programming.  I've been working in Perl for 6 years and in Java for
> > about 4 years, but I've never learned C and it seems C and C++
> > programmers seem to have completely different attitudes and a
> > language all their own.  Unfortunately, and I've come across this
> > in several FOSS projects, part of that language seems to include
> > being condescending to those who aren't in "their" world.
>
> Again, I am sorry for that. My understanding is, that we are a
> community, helping each other to reach the bigger goal. This includes
> expressing things in an understandable language and showing respect
> for each other.

Yes, I agree.  That's why I was working with people on macros and issues 
around that.  Some of my questions even ended up in Andrew's book on 
macros in OOo.  The people there were quite helpful and it was a good 
community, so I was glad to work with them and wanted to help.  On the 
other hand, when a programmer got snotty with me, it was years before I 
even considered filing any kind of issue again.  I've dealt with that 
attitude before and, as a former special ed teacher, I found it quite 
disgusting.  My job was to work with people that didn't understand in 
the same way as others and I had to show much more tolerance than most 
people ever do.  I've dealt with a few other situations where 
developers were almost hostile toward those they considered "end users" 
because the users did not have the same technical skills the 
programmers did.  It's totally inappropriate and it had happened with 
me in a few other FOSS projects, so I just gave up on filing bug 
reports.  If developers want help but aren't willing to treat those who 
try to help like humans, then I'm just not going to take the risk.

> > As I said, I've helped in other areas and when I get back to the
> > point where I'm writing again, instead of programming, I'm sure
> > I'll have a lot to contribute to in OOo.  It's been a big help to
> > me and I want to give back more than what I have, but I've just
> > found reporting issues to be a negative experience.  I don't know
> > if the intent of some of those programmers was to squelch me so
> > they could close the bugs, but the effect is that I've learned it's
> > not worth the hassle to report issues.
>
> There sure are cases, where opinions very, mostly I would trust the
> aspect matter expert, so certainly she or he may fail.

My sense was that in at least one case, the intent was to just get me to 
shut up so the issue could be closed and forgotten.

Hal

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