Bug 61365

Summary:	EDITING: Copying formula into whole column loops
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	Richard Parkins <aleph0hpela-bugz>
Component:	Calc	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	normal	CC:	jmadero.dev
Priority:	medium
Version:	3.5.0 release
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature:		Regression By:

Description Richard Parkins 2013-02-23 19:48:55 UTC

If you copy a formula, then select a whole column and paste, LibreOffice calc appears to get into a loop. Of course it could just be *very* slow, but I left it for 10 minutes and then had to reboot my machine because the whole machine had become unresponsive.

This is similar to the problem reported by andreas.tropschug@gmail.com in a comment on bug 43008, but the original problem reported on 43008 seems to have been closed as NOTABUG. IMHO if *any* user action can cause the program to loop endlessly, this is a bug. Users should not be able to do this. Of course you can argue that pasting a formula into a whole column is a silly thing to do. However for me the meaning is quite clear: I'm going to add rows of data and I don't know how many yet, and I want the formula active for each row into which I put anything. If you think this action is silly, you should refuse to do it and not loop.

Comment 1 Richard Parkins 2013-02-24 14:17:02 UTC

Actually it is just very slow. After just under an hour on my 2GHz processor it completes. I don't know why I had to reboot the previous time: maybe keeping one of the cores 100% busy somehow prevents the screen saver from noticing when I type something on the keyboard.

At any rate it is at least not very user-friendly for an application to commit itself to nearly an hour's worth of computation which can't be interrupted except by killing the whole application (potentially losing data), without asking the User whether that's what they really want.

Maybe someone needs to look at the performance of the implementation in this area too, given that the Evil Empire's spreadsheet does it almost instantaneously. Of course LibreOffice has deeper columns, but not 3600 times deeper.

Comment 2 Joel Madero 2013-05-29 21:06:57 UTC

This is a duplicate of the bug

@Richard - please do not open an identical bug just because you disagree with the fact that it was closed. If anything, leave a comment and try to convince developers/QA that it's a valid request. Closing this as a duplicate.


Also just FYI - Markus is one of the lead developers for Spreadsheet so he definitely knows what he's talking about:)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 43008 ***

Comment 3 Joel Madero 2013-05-29 21:08:07 UTC

Basically the issue is that it would take a complete rework of the code - Markus admits that at some point it might be valid but right now it is not because the code isn't ready for this kind of change. It's not a bug, at best it's an enhancement request and should be discussed on that bug, not this one.


Thanks!