Quote:
Originally Posted by Penru
Who said anything about doing it badly! It would still be doing the same thing it does now but have a couple tabs where it does to movies and music what it does to books...
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Ever heard the expression "jack of all trades, master of none"?
These are just my opinions as a developer for many years (but only recently fiddling with Calibre)...
Calibre has way too much of it's core functionality hardcoded around concepts related to books. From the database design to the way everything is named internally. Trying to generalise all of that at this point in Calibre's development would require a horrific amount of effort and rewriting - along the way things would inevitably get "broken" that are working fine today.
Then you start restricting your future development as every decision must now take into account the requirements of other media types rather than just books. You have to start designing for the lowest common denominator.
I can see why you suggested the idea - there are a lot of similar concepts Calibre has that you could apply to other media types. And if you are loading books onto a device that supports multiple media types, you are wanting to also put your music and video on there too. So I can see the appeal in theory.
However I think you would need to start from the ground up with such a goal in mind, which I've never seen Kovid express any such desire towards - Calibre is about being the best book mgmt application. Period.
If you want an example of the abomination that can happen when you try to shoehorn multiple media types into a single application - just look at iTunes. Surely one of the worst applications on the planet.