Looking at Shweta's ~/.tomboy/, I also noticed that her manifest.xml contains a whole bunch of mentions of notes titled "the smiths", even though none actually exists:

./manifest.xml:    <note guid="1676c501-f561-4e4b-84b8-5b8ee51c63a2" title="the Smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="7c099192-7c3a-4d2d-be9a-f94cfadf089a" title="the Smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="2a16f113-83cd-428f-b913-2bb73265ea9e" title="the Smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="5048e861-11c6-45a4-92c5-b34845dff768" title="the Smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="132f192d-9966-47f3-b01a-ae97158f751f" title="The smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="52288ec0-655d-46db-a2e0-4e5316e0f18d" title="the smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="c7153215-9106-4062-be8f-7c539c29f9f5" title="the smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="3345c16c-7aa3-4386-8ad2-dfde0991ea5a" title="the smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="a816bfdf-b696-46cb-991f-ce0cac354b64" title="the smiths" />
./manifest.xml:    <note guid="b4ab90bb-cda3-4165-86a9-13319889ffc8" title="the Smiths" />
[...etc...]

Wild guess: Tomboy uses manifest.xml to determine which notes exist at startup (and thus which phrases should get linked), and note deletion does not properly remove entries from manifest.xml?

This is also with the 0.9.4 preview release, btw.

manifest.xml is only used for synchronization purposes.  No other part of Tomboy uses that file.

Setting the default assignee and QA Contact to "tomboy-maint@gnome.bugs".

A follow-up to this bug:  I discovered that it happens any time I make a link starting with "S" or "N". It's not just the word "Smiths".

So if I type in, for example, "Sasquatch" or "Nautilus" and link them, then type in "the" before an instance of those words, "the Sasquatch" or "the Nautilus" become links.  If I do this to the original instance of the word, it overrides the link I made to do so.

It doesn't seem to happen with any other letter of the alphabet, and it doesn't happen unless I've made links out of the relevant S-word or N-word already.

In case it helps confirm this bug, here's a step-by-step recipe to reproduce:

1) Create a new note
2) Type "the sasquatch"
3) Highlight "sasquatch" (but *not* "the") with the mouse, and click on the "link" button on the toolbar.
4) A new note named "sasquatch" will pop up.  Type something in it or whatever.
5) Go back to the first note.

Expected behavior: in the string "the sasquatch", "the" should be normal text, and "sasquatch" should be a blue link.  Clicking on this link should go to the just-created "sasquatch" note.

Observed behavior: in the string "the sasquatch", the entire thing is a blue link, named "the sasquatch".  Clicking on this link creates a new note with the title "the sasquatch".  Now we have three notes -- the original one we created, a second note named "sasquatch", and a third note named "the sasquatch".

(If reproducible, this seems like a very serious bug to me, as it makes it impossible to link to some classes of notes in some contexts.)

Adding another situation in which this happens: with N-words but not S-words, adding "a" before the word also causes a faulty link to appear.

1) Create a new note
2) Type "a Norwegian"
2) Highlight "Norwegian" but not "a" with the mouse, click on the "link" button on the toolbar.
4) A new note named "Norwegian" will pop up.  Type something in it or whatever.
5) Go back to the first note.

"A Norwegian" will now be a link, rather than "Norwegian".

Okay guys, I tried following your repro steps (comment #5 or comment #6) but I cannot reproduce this in latest SVN.

Are you still having this problem in 0.12.0 or greater?

If so, is there any chance you could zip up your entire ~/.tomboy and email it to me (presumably you wouldn't want to attach it in a public bugzilla).

The NEEDINFO is 3 month old and I'd argue that this bug is probably solved by the string fixes for 0.13.5, see bug 323845.
I add myself to this bug's list and will close it after 1-2 weeks without response. Feel free to reopen it if your problem actually still exists with the latest release.

Ack, sorry, somehow I never saw comment #7.

I have version 0.12.0 in intrepid, and am having the problems described above.  Should I follow instructions in comment #7, or just upgrade and see if the problem goes away?

If you are able to check the latest version (note, latest means the latest version available or trunk/svn. There was/is a release today, so this is in no way related to _latest_ in your distribution) that would be awesome. If you are familiar with svn it's not even that hard to do.

Thanks for getting back that quickly.

I've upgraded to the latest version (I know nothing about this stuff but my husband's holdingmy hand through it) and ... the problem is not the _same_, but it is happening in the same _cases_.

Before, if A was a link beginning with some letters, and I typed "the A", "the A" became an overriding link.  Now in those same cases, when I type "the A" _nothing_ is becoming a link, including A, even though A has a page...

I've zipped my tomboy.  I made a "tomboy bugs" folder that should have everything you need -- it has my test pages plus a "Bugs in Tomboy" page that outlines my process & shows the links or lack thereof.  Sending it to you now.

Er, actually, before I run off confused, _who_ should I send it to?

Sandy was the one who asked for it. Send it to him.
I'd take a look as well if I can, but I'm the new kid in Tomboy Town and might therefore be worse at finding the particular bug.

Bottom line: Sandy. Ben, if you're inclined to do so and there's nothing too personal, so that you don't mind sharing it more than once.

Shweta, if you right-click on your Tomboy icon and select About, what version do you have? The latest development version with the fix (released yesterday and probably not easily available to you yet) is 0.13.5.

Thanks for sending your notes; we'll look into it as soon as we can.  Crossing my fingers that this is fixed now.

It's the current SVN revision 2354, claims to be 0.13.6.

I'm not familiar with svn myself, but Nathaniel Smith (who does other Linux dev stuff and is) installed it for me.

Right, comment #11 describes the (different, but still buggy) behavior of SVN trunk, while the comments before that are with 0.12.0.

Okay, I finally have got a chance to start looking at your notes. Really appreciate the "bugs in tomboy" note.

This behavior is not totally unexpected given the old behavior and the fix recently applied; hopefully I can use these notes to figure out what's really up.  Trying to figure it out...

I have just found this report after noticing similar strange links behaviour in Tomboy 0.15.0 (not latest SVN but from tarball on May 4th).
I have NEVER created a link manually, but these are being created AND changing my note contents.
An example:-
I had the following line in a note:-
urpmi task-kde4 --replacepkgs
I later created a new note with the title:-
urpmi skip.list
Initially I did not see a problem, but when I looked back the original note it had been changed to:-
urpmi skip.list task-kde4 --replacepkgs
On further investigation I find that all notes with urpmi in them that existed when the urpmi skip.list titled note was made have been erroneously modified.
This is a serious bug.

(In reply to comment #18)
> I have just found this report after noticing similar strange links behaviour in
> Tomboy 0.15.0 (not latest SVN but from tarball on May 4th).
> I have NEVER created a link manually, but these are being created AND changing
> my note contents.
> An example:-
> I had the following line in a note:-
> urpmi task-kde4 --replacepkgs
> I later created a new note with the title:-
> urpmi skip.list
> Initially I did not see a problem, but when I looked back the original note it
> had been changed to:-
> urpmi skip.list task-kde4 --replacepkgs
> On further investigation I find that all notes with urpmi in them that existed
> when the urpmi skip.list titled note was made have been erroneously modified.
> This is a serious bug.

You are actually experiencing a different bug.  What surely happened is that somehow you named the note "urpmi" (maybe you clicked off of the title, then clicked back on it), causing all instances of "urpmi" to link to the note, then updated the title to "urpmi skip.list", causing all the links to update.  You really want to follow bug #350990 and bug #574485, which are about protecting the user from messing up all of their notes during renames.