Bug 119601 - When writer is not installed, LibreOffice tries document recovery on good documents
Summary: When writer is not installed, LibreOffice tries document recovery on good doc...
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LibreOffice (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
6.0.3.2 release
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64) Linux (All)
: medium minor
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2018-08-30 08:22 UTC by Marco van Hulten
Modified: 2018-10-03 06:59 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Marco van Hulten 2018-08-30 08:22:27 UTC
Description:
On Ubuntu 18.04, I installed 'libreoffice-impress', which installed the 'libreoffice' binary among other things.  If I then open some document, say

    $ libreoffice document.docx

, it starts to try to recover the document.  This fails and LibreOffice exits (with exit code 0).  After confusion, I find out that libreoffice-writer is not installed, so I install that package, and the document can be opened without problems.

(In the case of an ODT file, or a plain-text file, the Document Recovery dialog is also opened, but it does not try to recover the file that you try to open.  LibreOffice is running without any documents yet opened.)

Instead of trying to open/recover a document that cannot be opened (because the right LibreOffice component is not installed), it would be better if the header of the file is interpreted and a proper error message is displayed, e.g.

    Cannot open document.docx, because the writer component is missing.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install a LibreOffice component, but not writer;
2. try to open a text document with the command 'libreoffice'.

Actual Results:
Document Recovery is started.  Recovery fails.

Expected Results:
An informative error message should be thrown.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: Yes



Additional Info:
$ libreoffice --version
LibreOffice 6.0.3.2 00m0(Build:2)
Comment 1 Buovjaga 2018-09-23 15:30:39 UTC
LibreOffice is not meant to have its "modules" be installed separately. I don't know, if this can be seen as a bug.
Comment 2 Buovjaga 2018-10-03 06:59:40 UTC
From a recent comment: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102023#c5

(Quoting Matthias Lang)
> In today's Debian testing, the 'libreoffice-writer' package can't be removed
> without forcing dependencies, so the bug can't happen any more. I've marked
> the bug as 'resolved-worksforme' because creating this situation seems to
> have become harder since 2016 thanks to Debian fixing dependencies.

So I think I will close.