Why is a file uneditable while saving?

[TJMeneses]

This has always kind of bugged me, but how come LibreOffice locks down whenever a save cycle happens? It doesn’t really matter when saving takes a blink of an eye, which is usually the case for smaller documents, but it becomes very inconvenient when saving much larger files, regardless of the application used (although I’ve had the most experience with Writer).

What is it that happens during a save, and how necessary is it to lock the user out while it’s being performed? Is there anyone else concerned with this, or is any work being planned towards alleviating it? I’d like to again point to Google Docs as a really good example of how saving can be done; you can work and save in parallel, without any loss of functionality or performance.

[magicfab]

I’d say this is a bug - although its implementation may be treated as a new feature. It’s something that doesn’t inconvenience a bug percentage of users so I doubt it will get very high priority - however I’d suggest filing a bug report: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport

[jkedar]

hi,
I take the film “Matrix” seriously. There is reality and there is illusion. If you switched off the power supply to your computer, you’ll have (1) Microsoft OS (2) LibreOffice (3) any other program not closed properly (4) ourself all screaming! We think we are saving the file we are editing. Sorry! we are not! We are saving temporary program maintained file (file segents). And the program has to replace your original file with this temporary file\file segments. And (I think) this is reason also for the dreaded “Do you want to recover your documents” message if save process is not complete.

[qubit1]

@jkedar, I’m not sure I understand your reasoning. Why would we not be able to

1. clone what’s in RAM, then
2. write the cloned copy in memory to disk?

I’m not aware of any limitation that prevents us from saving and editing concurrently; it may just not have been implemented yet.

[qubit1]

As MagicFab notes above, sounds like a good candidate for a feature request.

Please file an enhancement bug and provide as much information as possible. Don’t forget to mark your bug as an ‘enhancement’. The QA team will be happy to help you triage your feature request in the bugtracker.

Please post a link to any bugs you file in a comment below using the format “fdo#123456”.

Thanks!