[Libreoffice-qa] ESC meeting minutes: 2020-08-06

[Terrence Enger]

On Thu, 2020-08-06 at 16:57 +0200, Miklos Vajna wrote:
> 
>  * corrupted user profile: how to handle that? (Heiko)
>      + interesting if we have steps wrt how to corrupt it (Xisco)
>      + otherwise: clean the profile via safe mode

Yeah, I just had one of these (tdf#135398, of little interest).  And
the closest I could come for the wanted steps was "I routinely abuse
LibreOffice in every way I can think of, and then I do it all over
again."  This is somewhat short on detail. <grin />

I have hacked together a script to commit the user profile to a git
repository after execution of soffice.  My hope is that I shall be
able to usefully localize the origin of the corruption.  If I have
success, I will come back for advice on how to generalize and share my
work.

I guess success here means that
(a) I get versioning working;
(b) I stumble across another problem dependent on a corrupted profile,
    and I can bisect back to an execution of LO;
(c) the changes made by that execution are both small enough to bear
    examination and they inform somebody (probably not me) of what went
    wrong.
It would be good--but is probably too much to hope for-- that I should
remember what I was doing in that execution of LO.

Should I persist in this effort?  Thoughts welcome.

Meanwhile, for those who might be interested, here is the "usage"
message of the script:

    terry at buster:~/lo_hacking/git/libo6$ ~/lo_hacking/scripts/soff --help
    Usage: soff [ OPTIONS ] [ -- [ ARGUMENTS_TO_LO ] ]

    OPTIONS
      --help | -h     print this message and exit
      --intent MSG    one-line declaration, sticks until changed
      --soffice=run|debugrun|skip
          run      (default) run soffice directly
          debugrun run gdb around soffice
          skip     do not run soffice at all
      --skip-git      do not commit user profile after soffice
    ARGUMENTS_TO_LO are passed unchanged to LiberOffice except
    that ARGUMENTS_TO_LO are ignored when --soffice=debugrun

and after execution of:

    ~/lo_hacking/scripts/soff \
        --intent "just playing around with versioning the user profile" \
        -- -writer

here is the commit message:

    terry at buster:~/lo_hacking/git/libo6$ GIT_DIR=user_profile_git/.git/ \
                                         git log -1
    commit de5c2cee84ee6efc85d938600b4401d0e1d27da9 (HEAD -> master)
    Author: Terrence Enger <tenger at iseries-guru.com>
    Date:   Thu Aug 13 12:12:09 2020 -0400

        s-h 28022cee396715bc4b474ed1571074dc721bbe13
    
        just playing around with versioning the user profile
        exit code from soffice = 0; 2020-08-13T12:12:09-04:00

Thanks,
Terry.