[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Oops - my bad, thanks for correcting me. I always have automerge on so "just assumed" the matching logic was the same regardless of the setting. You know what they say about ass-u-me...

I've done the same many times - run with a certain option on, and forgotten what happens with it off. Or I've made the alternative error of remembering an older limitation and forgotten that the rapid development of Calibre has already fixed it. I just thought I'd set the record straight for those who are reading this.

Sorry if I caused any offense

I was not offended in the least - I should have put a bigger smiley on that. I completely agree with your comments.

you and I have debated this topic and the history in detail in other threads I just figured you would know where I was coming from.

I did.

I was trying probably unsuccessfully to walk a balance between not getting into too much detail (having suggested to the OP to look at some other threads), but sympathising with what I took to be one of his points of dissatisfaction with the dialog. In a later response on this thread I clarified the scenario in which I find the dialog "least helpful" The matching logic which you did is great, it's just the handling of same format merges I would like some additions to.

Did you notice the tiny change I made a while back to add a "Formats only manual merge"? That addition came from your comments. It allows people to keep a perfect metadata record and merge formats into it without also bringing in any additional tags, comments, etc.

Well to be honest in the last thread I discussed this with you my reading of the responses was that everyone was waiting for a new merge dialog. I have a number of suggestions/ideas for possible approaches and even some slightly better Python/Qt skills to be able to contribute. I figured there was no point in pursuing it further if there was no real interest in some "partial" solutions even if they do address the main issues I face. I completely understand your lack of motivation to be too involved given you no longer have a need to do bulk imports yourself

I wrote a moderately long post urging you to feel free to write any partial solution you are interested in. Somehow it was lost before it got posted. I didn't want you to feel you were treading on my toes by changing/improving that area of code. There are several things standing in my way of doing much work there. The first is that I've got less time now. The second is that I'm beyond the bulk adding stage. The third is that Kovid has the fine-grain control of metadata downloading on the ToDo list. I suspect that it would help make things consistent if I wait for that dialog to be written and then hijack it to provide fine grained control over merging and importing of metadata. Merging metadata from an online source is very similar to merging it from another Calibre book record or during the import of a new book.

That said, however, it's quite possible that work is in the far future, and/or that it won't be all that useful, so if you are motivated to provide a partial solution to problems you face - feel free to work on that area and submit it to Kovid. We are in agreement that there's room for improvement there.