[kiwidude]

I did a search for format_abspath and found I have six plugins which use that alone (Count Pages, Extract ISBN, Find Duplicates, Modify ePub, Open With and Quality Check). It is at times like this I greatly regret writing so many plugins.

I'm going to need to as you say look at all of these on a case by case basis, but undoubtedly it is going to dramatically slow down many plugins if I just roll with it. Some of these plugins like Count Pages, Extract ISBN and Modify ePub already make their own copies when they queue up for the background jobs, so I don't want to be making "copies of copies". Plugins like Quality Check and Find Duplicates effectively ran modally, so it didn't need to copy the files because nothing else was allowed access to them from the GUI. Open With as I mentioned above directly worked with the files, so that the user wasn't prevented from doing actions in Calibre while you edited externally, and didn't have to click on another dialog when done.

Ugh. This is not a trivial change.