[ciscoswitch]

I will simply say I'm sorry. My original intention was not to flame anyone, especially someone who is providing something to the open source community. I'm just frustrated, and somewhat upset. I'll explain a bit more:

I've never really had been a big fan of microsoft, I was a big fan of Commodore for the longest time, especially with the Amiga. Commodore demonstrated what really a OS should be, and their hardware at the time was simple amazing. Well as commodore died, I found myself using a PC with MS Dos/Windows 3.11 at the time, while I new my way around it, I still preferred my Amiga, and I still used it even though it was outdated, it worked for what I needed to do. I also got into linux as well. A couple years ago, I even setup my main computer with linux and demonstrated that I could still do everything I wanted to do (including games built for windows) on linux. I've been anti microsoft for quite a while. But, when Microsoft released Window XP, it was a big leap forward, it was very stable and had some nifty new features. Again the jump from XP to Vista was quite nice (Some people may not agree, there was quite a few problems with vista in the beginning, and it's memory requirements were quite higher than xp). From Vista to Windows 7 was another jump (again some people may disagree). Of course Windows ME was a big huge flop. At any rate, around the time of 98/XP I started to think about it, and thought the different configurations and hardware that MS is supporting (though it's really the companies writing drivers and such for their devices to be able to work in the OS), but also it had become a common standard to blame MS for any problems. I really started thinking about this, and realized that it's not MS that is ruining peoples computers (OK, so maybe some of it is their fault, but definately not all), from my days of trouble-shooting and configuring and setting up systems (in all different flavors of OS), as well as dealing with my own systems, I realized the problem. When you first install the OS, it's fast and snappy and generally works the way it's suppose to, the problem is that over time it degrades as you install and remove stuff from it. Programs do not remove everything they are suppose to, and over time your registry will grow and eventually start to become corrupt. I'm not exactly sure on the limits of the registry. Anyways, you end of making a choice... you either delete & reinstall (which in most cases is quicker than the latter), or you manually go through the system and find the culprits. The most common problems were related to the registry. When you install or use certain programs, they create entries in the registry for various things and settings (there was even a program that was storing data that the user entered into the registry), and then when one goes to uninstall that program, it leaves registry entries behind, and not only that, it doesn't remove all the files and such as well. Now files are not really a big deal, I mean it could be if your short on space and such, or have apps indexing stuff on the drive, such as microsoft search. But my point is that this really is not Microsoft's fault, but usually the blame is on Microsoft by most people. Now Microsoft could implement routines into the OS, to help keep this tidy, they shouldn't have to, but they could, and throughout their upgrades, they have addressed some things (such as with .dll files, programs would install different versions of .dll's for functions and such they use, lots of times these .dll's were different than what was on the system and would overwrite existing .dll's. Now this is kinda Microsoft's problem, in that the OS wouldn't exactly support multiple .dll's and would rely on the ones it needed. In Windows XP, they implemented the OS to keep all .dll's seperate, if a program had to replace one of them, it would allow it to, but it would keep all versions and keep track of which one is used for what program. That's just one example.

Now, I'm still anti microsoft in some ways, but I'm also a supporter (if that makes sense), I grow tired of people putting all the blame onto microsoft, or someone else rather themselves. Such is the fact of a program called Tunebite, on my computer it's drivers conflict with my sound card's control panel, upon getting support with it, they told me the problem was my sound card's control panel and not their software. Being this was an ASUS board and pretty popular, definately not some small off brand, I found this hard to believe, that the drivers for the sound card were at fault of some other program working with them. I understand that it's possible, but in this case it's very unlikely. My sound card worked fine otherwise. I contacted the sound card manufactorer just to humor myself, and they told me the problem was with the Tunebite drivers, and they actually went into detail a bit about it. But still it was the same thing, one points towards the other on whose problem it is.

Now in the case of calibre, I've seen various posts of people having issues, and them being told to manually delete certain files and folders, and reinstall and try again. With this, it proves that maybe either something should be built into the uninstaller, or a separate program written to scrub their computer of calibre clean, so that they can do a fresh install, this would eliminate the need to explain how to clean things off, so they can do a fresh install, but it also eliminates the possibility of the user not doing exactly what was directed. I believe that leaving those files there and worrying that someone will accidentally uninstall and loose are their settings is being selfish, or lazy to not fix the problem. At the very least maybe add an option to keep settings or remove settings. All I ever wanted to gain from this, was someone to take note, and say that's a good idea we'll add it in when we get a chance. Instead they got defensive and flamed me (hey I brought it on myself, I shouldn't have flamed them, just at the time I was frustrated).

With my job and all my hobbies, I really don't have the time to work on a calibre replacement, I'm sorry I even said that. I know I could write one, but it would take quite a while, as I have very little time to work on it, and sure it would most likely be buggy to begin with. However, would you ever consider re-writing the code in Perl? If I was to write one, I'd most likely use Perl, I believe it would give a tremendous performance boost, and at least on the linux platform, would run without version specific dependencies. Windows might be a little more hectic on the install though.

All that being said, my problem is when I try to upgrade to anything newer that 0.6.16 it installs fine, but I get an error about my library. The error details say that there is a duplicate column: uuid. Looking at the logs, it appears to be happening when upgrading the database between version 7 and 8. I do not believe that the db file is corrupt, as I have several backups of it, and it does it with all of them. If I go back to version 0.6.16 everything works fine. I've also tried installing the new version of calibre on 2 other different computers that never had calibre installed on them previously, and I get that same error. So from the looks of it, it seems that either something with or previous versions before 0.6.16 have modified the database and the new version isn't able to convert it, or there is some type of bug in database conversion routine. I know that people have responded and have had no problems with their upgrades, so it's a little hard to tell what the actual problem is.

If anyone wishes to respond to me (after all the things I've said), I just ask that you don't tell me to use some 3rd party installer, or tell me to delete my db file and try again. Calibre does work if I point it towards a new directory, however I have over 600 books in my library, and I really don't want to edit them all again, I had to manually add in stuff so it would look the way I wanted it to. If I create a new library, and tell it to add all the books from the old library, it adds them, but alot of the metadata is missing. I imagine that the metadata is stored in the db and not actually tagged on the ebooks.