Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
If there is so much of these threads, maybe that's because there is a real need. Just my 2 cents worth...
To the OP, don't take this personally, it's just a touchy subject.
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In case several years worth of discussion wasn't enough to get the point across...
No. There is no "need". There is a "want".
Many people would beg to differ with you about what is necessary. Many people consider this to be a superior system.
At the end of the day, it currently works for most people. The few who seem to find it to be an issue are under no obligation to use calibre.
There are ways of getting calibre to integrate with whatever other system you like.
The developer (Kovid) has followed this explanation (linked above, in the FAQ) with a personal declaration of active disinterest in hearing future discussion about his reasonable choice, on the grounds that either way he will upset people and he prefers it this way but mostly because he simply doesn't care, and you can write your own ebook program if you don't like it.
With an installed userbase of 26 million (current users 3.5 million) the number of complainant threads would have to be correspondingly noticeable (say, a hundred thousand active users, for a roughly one-in-thirty impact seems reasonable) before it would sound like any sort of real "need". But it's a good excuse for
Since no one has yet taken him up on it (even with all the recyclable backend calibre code freely available under the GPL3) I can only assume that it isn't quite as much of a "need" as you seem to think.
I don't mean to denigrate anyone's desire for a more customizable management system. But the idea that calibre must be that system,
and that calibre is required to change to meet your needs, is a bit much...
No software project will ever meet the needs of
everyone. There will always be mutually incompatible goals, and features that require more work than is worth the outcome.
The prognosis isn't all bad, though. Kovid said it would require a major rewrite of calibre (due to underlying assumptions in the library handling), but it could be done... if you are willing to put in the work. I am sure Kovid would merge the code if it was as robust as the current code and provided a choice (obviously the default would be to stay the same) and didn't come with performance hits.
But don't try to say Kovid has a "need" to do a major rewrite of calibre, which will result in people having a high likelihood of losing their files
just like in the exalted iTunes, and provoking the same endless complaints that iTunes provokes, in order to implement something very few people are interested in.
For a net gain in people criticizing his choices.