https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151679

--- Comment #10 from Thomas Tempelmann <[email protected]> ---
I agree with Kalle:

- DDE links are simply unknown on macOS, i.e. there's no documentation on it,
and clipboard behavior is expressly meant not to cause these side effects.
However, Microsoft apps (Word, Excel) do show similar problematic behavior on
macOS, i.e. when a clipboard recorder blindly saves all clipboard data and
later restores the clipboard contents, the data is not pasted back correctly
into Word or Excel, because the links included in the clipboard data have since
been invalidated, and the MS apps don't like that (there's, sadly, no fallback
code for such cases). Which means, all the clipboard recorders on macOS have to
know about these special types of data in the clipboard and ignore those (and
MS keep changing those every few years for our pleasure).

- macOS provides alternative clipboards. Some have official names (e.g. the
"Find" clipboard where apps put a search term into, sharable between apps) and
the rest are private (by naming them with a random identifier, ideally a
reverse domain name). The private ones are ignored by clipboard recorders but
are still sharable. So, if there are other apps who'd like to make use of DDE
features, including LO itself, it would be safer to use such a private
clipboard for this purpose, while putting all "plain" (unlinked) data into the
official clipboard. And then document this behavior. As a bonus, I'm
maintaining the domain utis.cc where we document special types. We could add a
reference to LO's behavior there (not that I think anyone will ever be
interested).

I believe that, by using an additional private (i.e. named) pasteboard, the
Copy/Paste code in LO could be changed fairly locally, without needing changes
to the UI, even. The change would be that, instead of reading/writing all data
in the various "flavors" of the default pasteboard, those flavors that are DDE
related would be put into the private clipboard instead. That way, LO will
still be able to write and read back the DDE links, whereas other apps won't
get confused by the DDE data when reading the default clipboard, not will they
cause LO documents to get altered (unless that side effect has since been fixed
somehow, as Patrick has suggested).

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