Unexpected behavior - Calibre 0.8

[zdt0343]

Hi -

I've been using calibre for the better part of a year on my dual-boot (Win7/Fedora) laptop. Recently I set it to auto-download a few newspapers every morning when the program is launched. This launch takes place in a startup script, either through a line in a Windows batchfile or a Linux/bash shell script (respectively):

start "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Calibre2\calibre.exe" --start-in-tray
--or--
calibre --start-in-tray &

OS1: Windows 7 64-bit, SP1
OS2: Fedora 16, 64-bit, 3.1 kernel
calibre version: 0.8.30 (latest)

Everything works swimmingly with a live internet connection. When there is no connection available, however, calibre complains (appropriately enough) in a dialog box that:

"ERROR: No internet connection / Cannot download news as no internet connection is active."

The program then exits, which to me is the unexpected behavior. My expectation is that the program would continue to run in the tray despite the lack of a connection. This behavior occurs in both operating systems and is repeatable under the circumstances described. The behavior does not occur when calibre is launched without the "start-in-tray" parameter.

Reviews of the forums here and elsewhere generated several mentions of the specific error dialog box in question, but none appeared to address these specific questions:

1) Is this behavior as designed? If so, can anyone suggest any workaround(s) to prevent the calibre program from exiting after being unable to download news? (Launching with the /MIN tag in Windows, for example, does not do what I want it to do, as the program then shows up in the taskbar rather than the tray.)

2) Is there a mechanism through which to stop calibre from generating the dialog box about the lack of a network connection and instead, say, delay the auto-download of news for some amount of time or until there is an active connection, etc. Admittedly, this second question may be a bridge too far, but thought I'd ask anyway.

Great program. Appreciate any input on the above.

Regards...

[kovidgoyal]

1) That is caused by a bug in Qt, to workaround it, simply restore the main calibre window before clicking OK. I will have a workaround in calibre for this bug in the next release.

2) The dialog box doesn't prevent the download of news (it is not modal). calibre should continue to download news in the future if the internet connection is restored, even if the dialog box is visible. In the next release, I will have calibre automatically hide the dialog box when the internet connection is restored, to make this clear.

[zdt0343]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

1) That is caused by a bug in Qt, to workaround it, simply restore the main calibre window before clicking OK. I will have a workaround in calibre for this bug in the next release.

Understood. Thank you.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

2) The dialog box doesn't prevent the download of news (it is not modal). calibre should continue to download news in the future if the internet connection is restored, even if the dialog box is visible. In the next release, I will have calibre automatically hide the dialog box when the internet connection is restored, to make this clear.

Brief comment here: I'm sure that for many (most?) users, existing behavior is perfectly satisfactory: a dialog box warns you when trying to fetch news without a network connection. Others (like me, for example) may wish to run calibre in the background/system-tray and set the program to fetch news from various sources at various times of the day/week/month.

As such, you may wish to consider giving users an option to turn off the network-connection warning altogether. Perhaps this is already possible, though I did not see anything during a brief look through the preferences pane.

Thank you again for a very sharp program.