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Originally Posted by Starson17
Yes, I can see that option. Also it would be nice to have the "reverse" option of just overwrite the existing format with the new format for when I knew I was adding better copies.
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Yeah, I think you would want to have all three possibilities - discard duplicate formats (existing behaviour), overwrite duplicate formats and create new books for duplicate formats. Perhaps in the Preferences there is a top level "automerge" checkbox like you have now, with these three as the radio button sub-options.
One thing I don't understand (perhaps it is legacy code not yet addressed?) is why you would have different matching logic between having automerge turned on or off. Surely a duplicate is a duplicate - you either automatically merge it using the choice in Preferences, or you prompt the user what to do interactively (giving them the three choices)?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Starson17
I think I'd actually rather have improved duplicate finding options for all of Calibre instead of tagging during automerge with "duplicate" that I would have to manage. If I think the new formats might be better, but I'm not sure, I could turn on the "keep all formats, and create new book record for duplicate formats" option, then run the improved duplicate finder with viewer, which would let me view duplicates located and merge or throw away those I didn't want. An improved duplicate finder would be great for existing libraries that needed work.
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Oh yes, totally agree that if there was a function in Calibre which could display books it considered as duplicates it could be a huge improvement over a tag approach. Particularly as you say for picking up legacy books, and that other case we discussed previously of a book not initially being seen as a duplicate due to bad naming but then "becoming one" after the automerge process when you clean the title up. The advantages the tags had was that it did not require analysing the entire database each time it was run, and you did not have to worry about false positives. However if the duplicate check was kept very fine grained (same logic as your automerge code does) then it could work quite nicely. It won't resolve everyone's duplicate problems from wide title/author variations, but it would cover the "known duplicate" space.
I wonder if running a duplicates search could be done as a GUI plugin. However I am hesitant to start investigating down that plugin route unless Kovid agrees (after all we can just deprecate the plugin later) as it seems like a feature that he perhaps may want built into Calibre to give wider user exposure. Plus he could obviously write it way better than I would anyway, though he has to find the precious time to do it first. The sub-options within automerge such as "create new book for duplicate formats" would require Calibre source changes of course.