Quote:
Originally Posted by geek1011
If you have any objections or suggestions/criticism with my reasoning, I'd be happy to hear it. I'm not making the plugin for myself (I don't use Calibre); I'm making it due to the many requests I have recieved.
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First let me say that I have concerns not objections. I'm not the target market for a kepubify calibre plugin so all I have is opinions - which you're free to ignore. After all, I'm not the one who will will be fielding support questions in these forums
The following is all personal opinion. I fully admit to being somewhat of a pessimist by nature, but then again, as someone once said "a pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist"
My first question would be why are kepubify users asking for it to be included in calibre? What are the features which aren't already available in KoboTouch (KT) and KoboTouchExtended (KTE)? The answer to this question is fundamental to what ought to happen next.
I don't know all the features in kepubify. Do you replicate some/all the add-ons in KTE?, some of the ones in the base KT? If so, this would be my biggest area of concern - similar features - but done differently (possibly). If/when a user posts here to say that one of these duplicate features isn't working as they expect they are not going to know whether it's KT/KTE or kepubify plugin causing the problem or possibly a conflict between the two. The latter could quickly degenerate into conflict between the two sets of developers. There are no winners if that happens. For that reason, personally, I'd avoid all duplicate features, e.g. leave metadata handling to KT.
As an aside, if it was up to me I'd remove some of the existing KTE add-ons because I don't think they belong there. But it isn't up to me, so I just don't use those and leave others in peace to do as they wish. It's fairly common for users to want all their favourite features gathered together in one place. Many developers have difficulty playing 'Bad Cop' so they prefer to say 'yes' when deep-down they know they should say 'no'
Feature-creep and -duplication ensues, to the benefit of no-one in the long run.
If your kepubify plugin was just going to be an epub-to-kepub (and possibly azw3-to-kepub) format-shifter - with the aim of adding a physical kepub to the calibre library without going through the full epub-to-kepub conversion process (as per Kepub Output plugin) then I wouldn't have any particular concerns about that. It's extra add-ons which duplicate the work of KT/KTE or other published plugins which concern me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by geek1011
Note that even if I don't make it a plugin, I can still add integration by allowing a user to drag a Calibre library over kepubify (which I'm working on right now, see the kepubify v3 issue on GitHub). Kepubify would detect the library and convert with a .kepub extension instead and will also convert to the correct folder.
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Again, I'm not the target market for this but as it's still basically a standalone feature I can't immediately see any particular cause for concern.