Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by buovjaga 113 days ago
LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program.

At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org

I recommend to consider our certification program: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/

I asked about the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later this week.

2 comments

> you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report

Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version, build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates about this bug report.

> you can do your own build with debug symbols

It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot easier to read.

> if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect

You can file a bug report from a crash report - it prefills all the relevant data. See an example crash report: https://crashreport.libreoffice.org/stats/crash_details/bac2...

"Bug reports for libc.so.6:

File a bug for: Calc Writer Impress Chart Base"

Here is what the dialog says about bug reports: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/master/svx/uiconfig/ui/cr...

> It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case

I believe most distros have this covered now, some by making use of debuginfod, which downloads symbols on demand: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Debuginfod

Thank you. This is all awesome work. BTW, I didn't know debuginfod existed :-)
Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc
Have you deactivated Tools - Options - Load/Save - General: Save AutoRecovery information...?
Yes. It still operates after that if I open a document that I didn't shutdown correctly. Many times I just open documents to take temp notes. and some times I shutdown the application with out saving and that document recovery process starts no matter what.
There is this command line option that you could add to your shortcut for launching LibreOffice: --norestore

It will skip the recovery dialog. I use it often when doing QA.