
Ubuntu Bug 255161: Openoffice can’t print on Tuesdays - franze
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28
======
cbright
It's interesting to follow some of abrianb's comments by date:

"When I click print I get nothing." -Tuesday, August 5, 2008

"I downloaded those updates and Open Office Still prints." -Friday, August 8,
2008

"Open Office stopped printing today." -Tuesday, August 12, 2008

"I just updated and still print." -Monday, August 18, 2008

"I stand corrected, after a boot cycle Open Office failed to print." -Tuesday,
August 19, 2008

~~~
lauradhamilton
To be fair, if that bug happened to me, even with 10-20 data points I don't
think I would have figured out it was a Tuesday bug.

------
tagawa
This reminds me of the case of the 500-mile email:
[http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

~~~
dangoldin
Also the printer that would jam when printing one file:
[http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200811/print_this_file_your_pr...](http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200811/print_this_file_your_printer_will_jam.html)

~~~
couchand
That one is amazing.

 _Just because a bug seems impossible doesn 't mean it is._

This comment reminds me of the magic switch (story [0], light HN discussion
[1]).

[0]: [http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-
story.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html) [1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181045)

~~~
dangoldin
This one's great! Thanks for sharing. Makes you wish there was a real cause
though instead of speculation.

------
spacefight
The tracked and actually fixed bug is:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619)

~~~
NAFV_P
I usually rely on LibreOffice, but I was tempted to get OpenOffice back on my
machine just to try out the bug.

Anyway, thank you for the link.

------
riquito
In the end the error was in the program "file", which erroneously was
detecting the postscript file as an Erlang JAM file

(see
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619))

~~~
scrollaway
Speaking as someone who has worked a lot on mime types: Do not ever use `file`
as a means to identify a file type. Use the shared-mime-info database.

[http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-
spec/share...](http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-spec/shared-
mime-info-spec-latest.html)

File has its own internal database. It can do more than the mime type db and
is great for quickly identifying and getting lots of info about various file
types, but it is AWFUL when used within other apps. Please, don't use it like
so.

~~~
filefile
Not sure I agree with this recommendation... shared-mime-info database usually
trails file(1) database by several years. Case in point: pcap-ng file format
was added to file(1) in 2011; was added to mime-info database in 2013.

Also, file --mime FILENAME gets you the mime type.

~~~
scrollaway
The file database is not extensible. This means it will not recognize file
formats specific to your setup, etc. With the shared-mime-info database, you
can have user-wide and system-wide extensions to the database, so installed
programs can (and do) install their own mime types. If you need to deal with,
for example, a custom image or archive format you can also set that up.

Additionally, the shared-mime-info database is much better curated than the
file mime database; file has a lot of wrong mime types (I have gotten a dozen
or so fixed so far). If there are file types that are missing from shared-
mime-info, please report them on
[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/) (there are
guidelines for good mime type reports, follow those and you can get a fix
merged in _very_ fast).

------
computatrum
This reminds me to a a bug in pdftk that appeared only between April and
December when Austria's localization is used:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pdftk/+bug/779908/...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pdftk/+bug/779908/comments/11)

------
progx
Tuesday is no print day. Save paper ;-)

------
Aarvay
This made me smile! :)

