OpenOffice Lock Files Not Being Removed On DavFS2

Posted in: technology. Tagged: linux, debian, office, davfs2

I have a mystery - I have two Debian Lenny servers both running the same version of davfs2 and the same version of openoffice.org.  When you open an openoffice document, openoffice creates a lock file of the same name, but prefixed with “.~lock”.  This file retains a copy of the document until you save and exit, whereon it is removed automatically.

The mystery is that, at one of our branches, it reduces size to 0, but is never actually removed; after which time the file cannot be edited until that lock file is manually removed.

Both servers have the same davfs2.conf and I have done a diff between the two servers:

# for file in `find /usr/lib/openoffice/ -name *.xcs -type f`; \
  do echo "=== $file ==="; \
  ssh root@other-server "cat $file" | diff $file - ; \
  done

But there are no differences.  I have checked users’ davfs2.conf files, but these are all commented out entirely.

Previously I had “fixed” this problem, by setting UseDocumentOOoLockFile to false in:

/usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.2/share/registry/schema/org/openoffice/Office/Common.xcs

This doesn’t stop the lock files being created, but it does tell Openoffice not to worry about them.  Unfortunately this no longer seems to be working, and I really can’t understand why.

Currently I have “fixed” the problem by setting davfs2.conf to:

use_locks 0

This is now allowing the lock files to be removed properly.  I believe that actually this will work quite well, with the UseDocumentOOoLockFile set to true, given that 99.9% of our documents are Openoffice documents.  Always assuming I can persuade Openoffice to obey its own registry!