Results of a survey of all LibreOffice bug reports related to Mac OS X accessibility features

For a long time, LibreOffice (just like OpenOffice.org) suffered from some tricky bugs related to Mac OS X accessibility features. The tricky thing about these bugs was that they only became visible when a user activated Apple’s accessibility utilities (“Universal Access”) or installed some third-party window management utility (like Moom, Cinch, RightZoom, BetterSnapTool and others) which relied on these features. So these bugs were real nightmares for our bug wranglers: the bugs were not reproducible on a plain Mac OS X installation, and most time the users reporting the bugs did not give any hint about accessibility features or window management utilities, but were under the impression that LibreOffice was a completely unstable application …

Now, in September 2012, Tor Lillqvist and Michael Meeks have submitted two important patches ([1], [2]) for bug 47368, “Many crashes when accessibility enabled on Mac OS X”, which have fixed most of theses problems. To find out which bugs are still reproducible and therefore need more attention, I have made a little survey of all bug reports related to Mac OS X accessibility features. This survey took much more time than I had expected, because many reports are not really explicit, and because I had to retest all the bugs with different LibreOffice versions. But the results are very encouraging — Tor’s and Michael’s patches have truly fixed “[m]any crashes when accessibility enabled on Mac OS X” ;–).

In all particular bugs reports you will find a statement in which I describe my test results in detail, especially the exact steps which I have used to reproduce the issue (such exact steps are missing from most of the reports). The following is a general summary of the results.

Bugs still reproducible

Status NEW/REOPENED. These bugs still require the attention of our developers.

47275: “Autofilter CRASH on Mac OS X when Mac accessibility features (Universal Access) are enabled”
Still reproducible, obviously a bug sui generis. Exact duplicates:
- 52342: “AutoFilter CRASH”
55156: “Hang on accessing any pane in the application Options dialog, when Cinch is running (related to Mac OS accessibility)”
Reproducible only if Cinch is running (at least, not with RightZoom). I have created a new bug for this remaining issue, giving (hopefully) a clear and distinct description. The issue itself has very probably existed since a long time, there was just no dedicated and clear bug report for it; cf. the following bugs which have been marked as RESOLVED/FIXED or /DUPLICATE because they are no longer reproducible under most circumstances, but come to life again if and only if Cinch is active, and which therefore could be about the same issue:
- 33359: “LibreOffice not responding after choosing anything in Preferences”
- 42014: “LibreOffice Preferences list change hangs with Moom running in Mac OS X Lion”
- 49942, comment #6 (issue only mentioned by the way in the comment)
- 52147: “LibreOffice hangs as soon as any page in Preferences is selected”

Bugs not yet reproduced, but probably reproducible

Status UNCONFIRMED. These bugs still require the attention of our bug wranglers.

54923: “Crash when navigating options”
New, not easy to reproduce; perhaps requires Mac OS X ≥ 10.7; the stack traces in the attached log files are unlike anything else I can remember; not yet clear if this bug is really related to Mac OS X accessibility features, but that seems probable.

Bugs which are probably fixed, but not for sure

Status NEEDINFO. I could not reproduce the following bugs, but can not tell definitely if they are obsolete (e.g., because of some ambiguity in the bug description, or because of a very special stack trace which I can neither reproduce nor explain), therefore I have set the status of these bugs to NEEDINFO. These bugs now require the attention of the original reporters. If they don’t answer in a reasonable time frame (I suggest to be generous here and to wait some months), we can close these bug reports.

31919: “Mac: program beach-balls and then crashes when topic is selected within Preferences”
37913: “LibreOffice crashes frequently when settings-dialog is opened”
Very special stack trace, shows infinite (?) recursion of SystemToOfficeDragActions() from libvclmxi.
39701: “LibO 3.4.2 FINAL Crashes because of double clicking in Preferences menu”
40301: “LibreOffice 3.4.2 with German language pack under OSX Lion 1.7.0 and 1.7.1 (German) crashes when trying to change settings”
47250: “Writer crashes editing table’s properties”

Mixed bug reports fixed by Tor’s and Michael’s patches together

Status RESOLVED/FIXED.

47368: “Many crashes when accessibility enabled on Mac OS X”
For a long time, this bug report was used as a “catch all” report: all issues related to Mac OS X accessibility features were simply marked as duplicates of this report. Therefore it was difficult to say when this bug, being a mixture of many different issues, would be actually fixed. So Michael Meeks decided to close it after his and Tor Lillqvist’s patches had been pushed and confirmed. For my survey, I have followed this re-definition and normally regarded bugs as duplicates of bug 47368 if (and only if) they where fixed by Tor’s and/or Michael’s patch.

Bugs fixed by Tor Lillqvist’s patch

Status RESOLVED/FIXED or /DUPLICATE, thanks to Tor’s patch. Many of these bugs are marked as duplicates of bug 47368. Some others which show a slightly different stack trace and were reported to occur while Cinch was installed have been marked as duplicates of bug 49942 instead, but this was just to make bug wrangling a bit easier; there is no real difference, because all these bugs have been fixed by the same (Tor’s) patch.

47015: “EDITING: table border editing crash”
49942: “FORMATTING TABLES crashes LO on Mac OS X when Cinch is running”
Shows a slightly different stack trace. Duplicates:
- 49623: “CRASH by adding borders to cells”
- 50710: “Application crashes”
  Mentions different kinds of crashes, without steps to reproduce them; identified as duplicate of bug 49942 according to the stack trace.
- 51791: “LibreOffice crashes often with Cinch running in Mac OS X Lion”
  Mentions different kinds of crashes, but the only well-defined is the one about about adding borders to a cell in Calc.
50467: “FORMATTING: Crash on Mac when adding border to a cell. Relates to bug 48329”
54281: “Cell thickness edge crash”

From a user’s point of view, this crash seems always to involve the “Borders” tab of a formatting dialog window — in the “Format > Paragraph…” dialog of Writer or in the “Format > Cells…” dialog of Calc, and probably elsewhere.

Bugs fixed by Michael Meek’s patch

Status RESOLVED/FIXED or /DUPLICATE, thanks to Michael’s patch. Most of these bugs are marked as duplicates of bug 47368.

33359: “LibreOffice not responding after choosing anything in Preferences”
44807: “LO crashes on MAC if is checked ‘Enable access for assistance devices’”
Partially fixed by Michael Meek’s patch, partially a duplicate of bug 44471, which is no longer reproducible.
51712: “Crash Performing @selector(showPreferences:) from sender NSMenuItem”
52147: “LibreOffice hangs as soon as any page in Preferences is selected”
Exact duplicates:
- 46981: “Crashes in preferences menu”
53221: “Writer crashes when double click on styles or page preview”
53240: “EDITING CRASH Insert custom field ‘x-y’ with content ‘x-y’”
54282: “Changing preferences crashes LO”

From a user’s point of view, this crash seems always related to a hierarchical list box including the small grey triangular control which is used to show and hide the sub-entries. All bugs which are related to the hitTestRunner() recursion include such a hierarchical list box: the pane selection in the LibreOffice Preferences/Options window (bug 52147, bug 54282, and others), or the list of styles with hierarchical view in bug 53221, or the document properties list in bug 53240 …

Bugs no longer reproducible in LibreOffice 3.6.1 and LOdev 3.7.0 (master)

Status RESOLVED/WORKSFORME. Most of these bugs are still reproducible in LibreOffice 3.5.6.2, but all of them had already “disappeared” before Tor’s and Michael’s patches were pushed to master, perhaps by some refactoring in the 3.6 development process.

42014: “LibreOffice Preferences list change hangs with Moom running in Mac OS X Lion”
According to original reporter no longer reproducible since LibreOffice 3.5.3.2. I doubt this, but if he says so we must believe him. Anyway, if the bug was still reproducible, it would have been either fixed by Michael’s patch, or it would be the same as issue 55156, for which there is a new (open) bug report.
44471: “FORMATTING: Changing character background color causes HANG”
Related to (actually, a part of) bug 51686, see below. Duplicates:
- 42866: “Fondo de carácter sin relleno cierra aplicación”
- 44807: “LO crashes on MAC if is checked ‘Enable access for assistance devices’”
  Partially a duplicate of bug 44471, partially fixed by Michael Meek’s patch.
50147: “EDITING: CRASH when switching from Slide Sorter (or Notes?) view to Normal view, with Mac OS X accessibility features enabled”
Duplicates:
- 47569: “Impress crashes when switching from the notes-view to normal-view”
- 52014: “Impression crashes when changing from slide sorter view to normal”
51686: “FORMATTING Background Colour ‘No Fill’ and Font Colour ‘Automatic’ cause LibreOffice to crash on Mac OS X when RightZoom is installed”
Duplicates:
- 50769: “EDITING: Many crashes on Lion (Mac OS X 10.7[.4]) when MacOS option ‘Enable access for assistive devices’ is checked”
  Mixed bug report; the only clear part is a duplicate of bug 51686.

Similar, but apparently not related bugs

I am not sure if all of the following bugs are not related to Mac OS X accessibility features, but this question is negligible, because the status of all these bugs is already RESOLVED/FIXED or RESOLVED/DUPLICATE.

48329: “Crash when adding borders, in Writer and Calc”
Duplicates:
- 46692: “FORMATTING: Setting a border to the header or footer causes a crash of LibreOffice”
- 50612: “FORMATTING: Adding a page border CRASHES on Mac OS X”
(and some more, which I omit here to avoid boring you ;–)