Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Removing "disappeared" songs

[Gisli Ottarsson <gisli ottarsson mscsoftware com>]

It seems that there will always be special cases, such as the one
outlined by Christophe, that defy automation.

I would like to offer the opinion that perhaps automatic refreshing of
the database ought to be abolished.  Now that the database contains
album-art associations which may have required significant manual
labor, automatically purging these can be a real disaster.  It was
different, before album-art, when one simply re-imported a folder 
and everything would be restored.

As a minimum, removal of a song from the database should first pop up a
dialog box to obtain approval:  "Database refresh has discovered that
file ### is not present.  Remove song from database? <Yes> <Yes to all>
<No> <No to all>"

Then there is the question whether the refresh ought to be automatic or
whether it should be manually triggered.  If the aforementioned dialog
box were added, I guess I could go either way on this.

Two related thoughts:

1) Why does the refresh only *delete* songs?  If I used "Import folder"
to read a directory tree into Rhythmbox and then later add a new
subdirectory to this folder, why shouldn't Rhythmbox import the new
folder during the next refresh?

2) It would be nice to be able to delete a song file or an artist or an
album directory from within Rhythmbox.  Note that I am talking about
actually removing the file/directory from the disk, not just from
Rhythmbox's database.  Needless to say, this should pop a dialog box
with well crafted alarms.  This would likely remove some of the need
for today's automatic refresh and would address Christophe's use case. 
It also addresses the pointlessness of the current 'Delete' feature,
which deletes the song from the database, but promptly restores it
during the next automatic refresh.

Thanks
 
   Gisli


On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 20:37 +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Le lundi 16 mai 2005 à 13:00 -0400, Stefan Monnier a écrit :
> > I finally managed to compile 0.9 to try it out and the support to handle
> > "unmounted" filesystems doesn't help me (I access my NFS-mounted filesystem
> > via symlinks, for example).
> > 
> > I think the only *safe* moment when we can remove an entry from the database
> > is when the two conditions are met:
> > 1 - `lstat' says the file doesn't exist.
> > 2 - the directory in which the file should reside does exist.
> 
> Hmm, I didn't parse that properly, sorry for my first mail ;)
> But it still has the issue that it wouldn't be suboptimal (stale
> rhythmdb entries) for people using an Artist/Album/ hierarchies and
> deciding they no longer want SomeArtist in their library and so rm -rf
> SomeArtist.
> 
> Christophe
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