Add Books Issues

[martindiv]

I am trying to add over 900 books to Calibre and I am having some serious issues. I am using Calibre 0.7.9 on Gentoo Linux.

In preferences, Add/Save, Adding Books: I have "Read metadata only from filename" checked. I also have the following regular expression:

(?P<author>.+?) - ((?P<series>.+?) - (?P<series_index>[0-9]+)-|)(?P<title>.+)

I have tested this expression against nearly 50 different titles I am trying to add and it works every time. When I try to add books either from "Add books from a single Directory" or "Add books from directories, including sub directories (Multiple books per directory, assume every book file is a different book)" the regular expression is ignored and the title gets added with the entire filename in the title column and the author set as Unknown.

I also get the following error when I try to add a book:

WARNING: Failed to read metadata: Failed to read metadata from the following:

Anthony,Piers_-_Adept_-_01-Split_Infinity.doc
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/add.py", line 176, in add
    mi = MetaInformation(OPF(opf))
  File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/ebooks/metadata/opf2.py", line 474, in __init__
    raise ValueError('Empty file: '+getattr(stream, 'name', 'stream'))
ValueError: Empty file: /tmp/calibre_0.7.9_3i1lgI_rm_worker/0.opf

So, it obvious that calibre is completely ignoring the preferences I have set up. Is there some trick I need to use in order to get this to work?

[kovidgoyal]

this is a problem with your install. Basically the worker process used to add the books is crashing. I would suggest uninstalling and using the binary from the calibre site. Gentoo does funny things to its python interpreter.

[martindiv]

Ok. Installing the binary version worked.

Out of curiosity, can you be a little more specific about what Gentoo does to python in order to cause this problem?

Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

They use a binary wrapper that is responsible for launching the actual python interpreter. And that wrapper does something funky when launching the interpreter, either it doesn't pass in the environment variables or something else, I haven't bothered looking at the code to figure out exactly what.