[Worldwalker]

Eowyn, I started out on your side, at least as far as making calibre work for you goes. One person has changed that: you.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Organising files is just as important as organising book.

The people who built calibre disagree. They think organizing books is more important than organizing files, just like organizing files is more important than organizing disc sectors.

And your signature is proof of something, I'm clearly not the only one.

I'm beginning to wonder if there actually is some significance to the fact that people who demand changes in how calibre works are, nearly always, rude, insulting, and confrontational. There are exceptions, but not many. Usually it's someone barging in here saying "calibre sucks and Kovid is stupid, but make it work the way I want it, instead of the way a million other people want it, and I'll stop being so insulting." People who want to see calibre improved generally offer polite, helpful suggestions, and sometimes dive into the code. But, as they say, haters gonna hate.

And think a little. Would a function allowing the user to say how files are organised be a problem to you ? Would that make calibre less usable to you ?

If it changed how calibre worked, yes, it would. I want a book organizer, not a file organizer. And, so far, nobody has presented a way of reverting calibre to organizing files that would not interfere with its functions as a book organizer.

Then why would implementing such a feature bother you that much ?

Because I'd have to code it, and I don't want to. If I'm going to spend that much time, I'd spend it on something I want for myself.

In general terms, someone would have to code it, taking them away from coding things I would prefer to see, and again, I'd lose.

I like the way calibre works. It does not have an infinite amount of coder time available. The people who are working on it already have a huge list of things the people who find calibre useful want them to do; it would be an unproductive use of their time to throw that list away in order to change calibre in order to satisfy a small number of people notable for not using the program. If you want changes that the devs don't think are necessary, the onus is on you to make them. The devs and the users are happy with it as a book organizer. They don't see a need to turn it into a file organizer. Why should they drop the things that they think are important to do something that you think is important?

That's what some people don't get about FOSS: It means that they can change the program to do what they like, not that some stranger is saddled with an obligation to work for them for free. If you want calibre to be a file organizer, then make it into a file organizer. If you can't code, contract with someone who can. You're free to do that; it's kind of the point. But the people who can code, and who are working on calibre, want it to be a book organizer, and they're not about to take time away from making it be a better book organizer to do what someone demands -- especially when those demands are stated belligerently, starting with an insulting and demeaning thread title (do you think that a million people use calibre even though it isn't usable?) and continuing through multiple posts.

Somehow, I don't think that people who go into Macintosh forums and demand that the Mac OS be rewritten to work like Windows are treated nearly as well as the people who say calibre should be changed into something it's not and which is directly contrary to its design philosophy. In fact, I suspect if someone posted a thread entitled "Any way I could get OS X usable?" with such a demand, they wouldn't have time to be laughed off the forum because they'd be banned for trolling. People here (me perhaps excluded) are not only nicer than they have to be, but quite probably nicer than they should be. Overall, the calibre community is a bunch of nice people who have a difficult time recognizing when someone else is not interested in being nice.

People started out in this thread giving you all kinds of helpful suggestions for how to make calibre do what you said you need it to do. Your response was to slap them across the face. This doesn't make people want to help you.

Right now, you need to calm down, go back and read the suggestions people made, and think carefully about whether those would work, or would be the start of a solution. You might need to ask more questions about them, or have people clarify what they said (those who are still participating, anyway). I'm not a workflow expert, but it looks to me like there are ways in which the suggestions people have made will work. If they will, great; we'll help you implement them. If they won't, then you say "I don't think calibre is going to work for me" and move on.

Calibre isn't for everyone; it may not be for you. But hostility doesn't have to be any part of that.