First, the new version works very well.
Comments:
- I like the manage duplicates dialog.
- if I run a test that finds one group, then mark that group as exempt, I get the message "No further duplicate groups exist for 'None'". If I subsequently run the test, I get "No duplicate groups were found using 'similar title, similar author'". Perhaps the 'None' was supposed to be 'similar title, similar author'?
- Using the restriction in 'One group at a time' mode does exactly what I expect and want. The tag browser is very useful for (tada) browsing, because it shows only the values for the books in question. I can quickly scan other metadata such as series and tags simply by looking that the items in the browser, rather than scrolling the library view and sorting.
- I was unable to make anything break by pushing the clear button or by clearing the restriction. However, using the tag browser to do searches has the side effect of leaving duplicate_check mode when cycling through searches, because one of the states clears the search. I don't know if this is a problem, and if it is, I don't know how to fix it.
- The problem where the use_marks configuration flag was being reset has been fixed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwidude
It is a good question as to whether there is crossover from the author exemption list to the book find algorithms. My first instinct was to say the answer is that there should be.
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I am still not convinced that we need author exemptions, much less to use them in book searches. The reason is that we are dealing with books, not authors. Searching for fuzzy author, ignore title, I get a list of books. I may know that S Smith and Steve Smith are different authors, but I don't know that all the books have the correct author. If I mark these authors as exempt, then how do I check for mistakes (repeats kiwidude's argument)? One author at a time? I argue that seeing the books by both authors together helps me see errors more easily than seeing the books one author at a time. In addition, an author search might find duplicate books, such as S. Smith "2 Vampires" and Steve Smith "Two Vampires" (and other variants). An author exemption would block showing these.
As for mixing author exemptions with book exemptions, kiwidude's 'complexity of interaction' argument is spot-on. I imagine trying to write documentation describing how things work, and end up pulling my hair.
Finally, and probably a red herring, there are situations where S Smith and Steve Smith are in fact the same author, but listed differently on purpose. This happens all the time in academic papers, where the author name varies slightly from paper to paper. Do I need another kind of exemption to handle these?
I do recognize that other people might want to work differently. There is nothing that forces me to use author exemptions. My argument against them is based mostly on complexity, especially as this code will be integrated into trunk, where it might be touched (maintained) by more than one person as calibre evolves.