Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
What you said in this post matches my mental model, FWIW
PS: Sorry about the rapid-fire posts. It is easier than trying to combine them all into one.  |
Thanks Charles and no problem - individual responses are easier than wading through a range of stuff like I sometimes waffle on about.
So to continue my trend exactly on that point - thx for the suggestions on the selection dialogs and variations, I'll look to make that change.
As for the "not needing a different resolution" for duplicate authors, obviously my follow up post was my attempt to think out loud further on the topic. If we allow the user to do "ignore title" searches, then they will have the "ability" to do what are in effect duplicate author searches. My question I raised over this was whether that actually was the "best" way to approach the problem.
Functionally it will help do the job, and it ticks a number of the boxes for what you will need to do such as seeing all the books for that author to make a decision. However it will mean you end up creating potentially masses of rows of duplicate exemptions versus perhaps an alternative implementation allowing exempting author combinations instead (which would also prevent future books from those authors appearing).
I will also add author to the sorting of results (since you will want title within author within marked).
With a standalone duplicates tool I wrote a while ago it did several passes through the data running various types of algorithms. So I could consider and attack the low hanging fruit first of the "almost certain it is a duplicate" cases, then effectively re-run again to find the "less likely to be a duplicate" cases etc. From a workflow perspective I first considered my report of potential author duplicates - because if you got the authors renamed correctly then it meant that subsequently running a title based comparison with exact author you were down to just genuine merges required.
So in this author based report of my Calibre library, I could quickly just scan down a list of author names. Once I found a "suspicious" new combination then in Calibre I would do an or based search for those authors, and lookup the authors on FantasticFiction with Search the Internet to verify all the books did appear under a single author name.
None of this is precluded from being done with the plugin (assuming we add more flexible title/author permutations). It just may involve a lot more scrolling, a lot more "noise" and a lot more duplicate exemptions. Plus you have to consider how you will actually do the renaming as well - finding the author in the tag browser, drilling down in to the author then doing a bulk edit or whatever. No real harm and of course you could refine things a bit with using the search box or tag browser but it is a slightly different variation mentally in approaching the resolution. If instead there was a more author-centric view of the results in this scenario, it could make some of this a few more steps.
As a first cut what we have is fine bar the lack of support for author based duplicate searches imho.