Comment 13 for bug 1389858

Björn,
> 1/ LibreOffice did not update references correctly and consistently on sort before 4.2.x

You are confusing the issues here. No spreadsheet software consistently updates or does not update references, because there are many types of references. However, there is a well established behavior that
a) Sorting RELATIVE references does not update
b) Sorting ABSOLUTE references does update
All spreadsheet software followed this behavior, including LibreOffice before 4.2.x, Gnumeric, Google Sheets. WPS Sheets, and EXCEL

> There is an equal set of users who want references

Equal? Over the past few years there have just been a few bug reports asking for the new sort behavior. These were filled out by users who admittedly are new to spreadsheets and do not know how to use absolute references. In just a few weeks, this new sort has caused dozens of bug reports like this one and all the dupes of Bug 81633. In fact the [Meta] Bug 85490 that's supposed to track usecases could only find ONE synthetic example that could easily be FIXED with absolute references.

> Note that the upcoming LibreOffice 4.4.x will default to the fdo#81309 behaviour (Sorting should automatically adjust references.)

By changing the behavior to update references, you will be insidiously breaking spreadsheets. Unless the users are looking at the formula, they may not realize that newly sorting spreadsheets are giving invalid results like https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85571 Where 1+1 = 3 after a sort with the new system

Why are we breaking old spreadsheets and interoperability for a few users that don't know how to use absolute references?