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Thanks for all the input Starson17. On the whole I think the merge as implemented does the best job it can without becoming a lot more complicated, so congrats to you on that. There are as you say so many permutations and circumstances it is only a fine grain dialog that can address everything we want.
A few weeks ago I just tweaked the source code in my version as a quick compromise to fit the behaviour I wanted for comments/tags - the nice thing about open source. With that plus my own tool I mentioned for pre-processing to handle identifying duplicates etc and it does the job. Looking into that published date is the one quirk I hadn't gotten around to investigating and only thought of that possible resolution today, though as stated I generally try to merge "formats only" into my master record.
In fact I did consider proposing a "Merge Formats only" menu option because 99% of the time that is the behaviour I want but decided to see what else the Calibre developers come up with first. Thinking out loud, the behaviour could be that if no conflicting formats are found, the merge would happen with no user interaction. If conflicts are found, a dialog pops up listing the conflicting formats in the rows, and you choose which ones you want to "win" (having the ability to launch the viewer from that dialog). That would remove a few steps from the current process and keep people like me happy who almost always want to merge into their "tags & metadata already how they like it" records.
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