GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 444685
Changing the title of one note can corupt other notes
Last modified: 2014-05-25 02:39:53 UTC
Steps to reproduce: Create 2 new notes. type "foo bar foo" as the content of the note #1 change the title of the note #2 to "bar" change the title of the note #2 to "foo" change the title of the note #2 to "bar" again. Got: the content of note #1 now is "_bar_ foo foo" Expected: the content should be: "foo _bar_ foo" This can lead to some very serious problems if you will temporarily change the title of your note to let's say "." or "?" as that will replace all the punctuation marks that are the first ones in that line with your newly typed in note title.
We are going to be implementing stricter rules for naming Tomboy notes (see bug #350990). I think this would reduce the potential for the sort of damage you're talking about. I'm marking this bug as dependent on bug #350990. Does anyone disagree?
Removing dependency on bug #350990. I misunderstood this bug. Reported bug can be reproduced even with multi-word titles.
What would be the preferred way to handle this? The behavior is what is expected, It marks 'bar' as a link, and then when you rename it to foo, it renames to link, so you'll end up with 'foo foo foo', and then ofcourse it just chooses the first 'foo' to rename to bar, instead of remembering that the middle one was the first link. Do we keep a history log? Do we prompt the user for changes that are happening in their notes?
Setting the default assignee and QA Contact to "tomboy-maint@gnome.bugs".
I would propose that the in-note text be left alone if the user changes the title of another note. The fact that it is still linked to the correct note should be enough context. Changing the in-note text doesn't seem to have much practical value, and can lead to some very confusing situations. This would also alleviate #350990
I just wanted to say I agree, the other day I fooled around with tomboy (0.12.0), and changed the name of a note to d and changed it back, which resulted in a lot of text being edited. I suggest some way of acknowledging the renaming (perhaps a list of notes being edited) or that the user needs to select the words that should link actively (by right clicking or something) and only linking words being renamed.
I can confirm this bug on the latest tomboy as well. Its kindof hard to see the problem because this really looks like 350990. This is what I think the bug is meant to show: Create two brand new notes. In the first note set the text to "Once upon a time.". New Note 1 Once upon a time. New Note 2 <empty> Now change the title of New Note 2 to "a time". The contexts of New Note One will be Once upon _a time_. Now rename the title of New Note 2 to "Once upon". The contents of New Note One will be _Once upon_ _Once upon_. Everything looks good so far. New rename "Once upon" to "a time". You would have expected this ... _a time_ _a time_. but you get this ... _a time_ Once upon. Is this the issue we are recording?
Yup, that is the bug. Confirming based on your comment, Mike.
Excuse me guys, I think some people didn't get the original message, but maybe I'm wrong. I've met this problem just today and hope it's equal to that Ignas Mikalajunas reported. I use Tomboy on my dual boot laptop. I have Tomboy in Ubuntu Linux and in Windows XP installed on the same laptop. I've configured synchronization via local dir that is a sub-dir of Dropbox dir. Today when I've rebooted to Windows and synced I've got too many notes updated and many notes conflicts. After a little investigation I've seen some strange behaviour of Tomboy. I have a `hosting' word in the note titled `Note 1' and a note titled `hosting'. When I changed `hosting' title to `python hosting', all occurences of `hosting' word in other notes magically changed to `python hosting'. So I've got another text in my `Note 1'. Maybe it's the behaviour you wanted Tomboy to behave, but for me it's very surprising. If I write a note, I want it to stay unchanged until I change it myself. Because it's firstly note-taking system for me and it's important for me that my notes are in the same state I left them during last change. The text I've written is the most important for me in note-taking system. So that's the bug as I can see. Or maybe just specific behaviour. In that case I'd like to have an option in preferences to disable auto-update of other notes when changing a note's title. PS. Actually I'm very happy that I've found this application — it have increased my productivity a lot at my work and in my personal life. So thank you guys, hope Tomboy will be available on all existing keyboard-enabled platforms ;)
Ruslan, that is a feature, but it is one we intend to make optional soon. In any case, the bug you want to be following is bug #350990.
Drop severity to Normal, now that note renaming is generally safer. We still need to fix this bug, but I think it's a fairly rare case.