"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying."

Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by fweimer on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:56PM (#50487193)

Well, OpenOffice wouldn't print on Tuesdays:

“ What a fascinating bug!! My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?! Then she demonstrated it. Sure enough, won't print on Tuesday. Other applications print. I think this is the same bug. Here is my guess:

Print to a postscript file. Observe the line: %%CreationDate: (Tue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)

Change "Tue" to anything else: %%CreationDate: (XTue Mar 3 19:47:42 2009)

Save the file and it prints. Tools like evince work because they simply omit the "CreationDate" tag to begin with.

Now something odd happens when my cups script (I am using the Brother MFC420CN) copies the file to a temp file. Some of the code is rearranged, not sure how or why, but it uses a command called "file" to identify the file as "PostScript". This check would work on the original file you printed, but by the time it runs the check on the temp file, it misidentifies. Normally it would return:

   PostScript document text conforming at level 3.0

But there is another check that happens before the PostScript check. If it finds "Tue" at the fourth byte of the file, it identifies it as:

   Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991\011Erlang JAM file - version 4.2

So it's not a problem w/ openoffice.org, cups, or the brother printer drivers. It is a bug in the `file` utility, and documented at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619. ”

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by ivanche on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:05PM (#50487327)

Sure, Ubuntu bug from 2008 (!) exposed in an abandoned project must be super relevant for LibreOffice in 2026.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by arcfour on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:08PM (#50487371)

I think it was intended to be a humorous anecdote playing off of the original joke, and not an indictment of LibreOffice or any other OSS.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by colejohnson66 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:09PM (#50487407)

LibreOffice is based on OpenOffice. OP was also (almost certainly) being tongue-in-cheek.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by ssl-3 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:05PM (#50487333)

That's really neat.

But now, I really want to know why my office suite needs to tell my printer what day of the week it is.

If the printer is smart enough to make use of that kind of information, then isn't it also smart enough to sort that out on its own? If so, then it seems superfluous.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by arcfour on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:09PM (#50487398)

Doesn't seem to me like it is telling the printer what day of the week it is because the printer needs to know so much as it is generating a PostScript file for the printer to use and is adding the creation date as either a convention or requirement of the format, and not the printer.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by bombcar on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:23PM (#50487607)

Exactly, it was using the file utility to determine what it was so it could print it correctly (by processing it if needed to a format the printer understood) and there was a bug in that.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by bitwize on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:37PM (#50487820)

This is one of those "VLC is slow to start because of a bug in Windows" things. It's VLC's responsibility to ensure their program runs properly on the OS people actually have. It's LibreOffice's responsibility to ensure that their files print on Tuesday irrespective of bugs in CUPS (which ships with the Mac).

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by ssl-3 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:45PM (#50487924)

It's important that software behaves well on systems with bugs. (All systems have bugs.)

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by braiamp on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:55PM (#50490457)

So, Windows gets a pass for being sloppy coded? Give me a break. Every software must fulfill their contract with every consumer rather than consumer have to work around producers quirks. "All means are fair except solving the problem"[0]

0: https://yosefk.com/blog/all-means-are-fair-except-solving-th...

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by gpvos on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:33PM (#50487757)

Not a requirement, but indeed more of a convention or at least a possibility. Postscript files can be postprocessed or read by humans, and then this kind of metadata can be useful.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by ssl-3 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:43PM (#50487897)

Other things were reported to successfully be print on Tuesdays, so that inclusion empirically unnecessary.

And the whole CreationDate field is optional in PostScript[1], anyway.

[1]: https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by notatoad on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:48PM (#50487962)

>so that inclusion empirically unnecessary

this seems like a post-rationalization. when an app generates a file to send to another service, it's usually a good practice to timestamp that. unless you're severely bandwidth-constrained, putting a timestamp in your protocol almost always solves more problems than it creates. "we shouldn't include a timestamp because it might at some point trigger a date-math bug" is just not how software gets built.

the fact that the software can still print without including a timestamp doesn't mean it's not worth including.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by adrianN on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:53PM (#50488029)

Maybe we should think about building software in a way that only adds stuff that is truly necessary.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by swsieber on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:10PM (#50488296)

I have. I don't like it. I'd rather have the ability to debug, redundant checks, etc. than only what's truly necessary.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by notatoad on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:19PM (#50488406)

if this bug was caused by a lack of a datestamp instead of the inclusion of one, you'd be here leaving comments about how silly it was they didn't include something as standard and widely useful as a datestamp, and that of course that was necessary.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by olalonde on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:10PM (#50488975)

Can be useful to distinguish when a print job was submitted from when it was actually received by the printer. That distinction matters when printers go offline and jobs get queued.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by ssl-3 on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:15PM (#50489788)

Is it possible or practical to examine a printer's internal queue for jobs that might include this (completely optional) CreationDate field?

If not, then: I'm not sure that the distinction means anything. :)

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by olalonde on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:44PM (#50490295)

Yes. Many printers have a web interface where you can see active jobs, job history, timestamps, and document information. Some even have a physical control panel that lets you inspect this information directly from a touchscreen.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by h1bslop on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:08PM (#50487387)

these types of bugs are epic. often due to people trying to mix and match date and int math

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by cyberpunk on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:47PM (#50487943)

I miss Joe Armstrong.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by TacticalCoder on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:23PM (#50488447)

> It is a bug in the `file` utility

OK but although I love the file utility, why does OpenOffice and/or CUPS rely on it to... print a file that ends with the .ps extension?

It's kinda begging for troubles.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by SpaceNoodled on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:25PM (#50488469)

Assuming file type by name rather than by contents opens a whole 'nother can of worms.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by merb on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:27PM (#50488498)

Tbf magic bytes are also not that helpful here

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by yrjrjjrjjtjjr on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:34PM (#50489258)

Content injection vulnerability is bad, and that's the core of what sniffing does. Failing randomly like in this case is mild in comparison.

Like I get that sometimes you have to do what you have to do, but sniffing should be a last resort.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by Someone on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:56PM (#50490478)

[delayed]

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by monegator on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:59PM (#50488848)

reminds me of the "email fails over 500 miles" bug lol

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by olalonde on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:12PM (#50488997)

clickable: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=500+mile+email&utm_source=chat...

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by glitchc on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:21PM (#50489095)

Thank you for sharing such a brilliant bug.

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by askvictor on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:29PM (#50489203)

But "Tue" is not at the fourth byte of the file in your example

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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by k0morebi on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:08PM (#50489666)

This is up there with the "wifi only works when it's raining" story

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