[IncludeSecurity]

The main developer of Calibre has had a long history of arrogant statements like that. Most famously illustrated in this bug report thread https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

It's like...how many times do security researchers have to exploit your code (and your many "fixes") before you change your program's mounting architecture?

I read this bug report when I want to feel something.

[slightwinder]

> The main developer of Calibre has had a long history of arrogant statements like that. Most famously illustrated in this bug report thread https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

That's more ignorance that arrogance. He fixed what he understood, and discussed what he did not understood till he found a satisfying solution.

Personally I wouldn't trust a dev who fixes stuff blindly which they don't understand. Though, in case of security this of course can have also bad outcomes, as illustrated in this case in the process. But that makes it even more important for everyone to follow through and communicate clearly. Which did happen here at the end.

[nikbackm]

That's almost 9 years old now.

Maybe time to let it go?

Unless there are more recent examples to point to. Or the problem still is not fixed.

[square_usual]

Yeah, he is... a character, to say the least. It's a shame because outside of Konsole, Kitty is the closest thing to iTerm in the linux space. what's holding it back from being as powerful and usable is basically not having a UI at all, and he's opposed to having more GUI at all, like on this very basic feature: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1402

[dotancohen]

Have you tried Konsole, the KDE terminal. It is absolutely terrific. It handles RTL and multibyte characters perfectly, works with tmux, has monitoring for both activity and silence, renamable tabs, horizontal and vertical splitting, bookmarks, scrolling, colour support, on-the-fly font resizing and colour scheme switching, keyboard shortcuts that do not conflict with any *sh, copy and paste shortcuts for both the normal clipboard and the X11 clipboard, supports the mouse, search functionality, I could probably go on. If iTerm has any feature that I'm missing, I'd love to hear about it.

[square_usual]

I mention it in GP! It's what I'm using, since I use my mouse heavily to get my setup, and Kitty just isn't for mouse users.

[dotancohen]

Oops, yup, I see it now!

[yewenjie]

I wish I knew how to fit all these features of an advanced terminal to my use cases.

[square_usual]

Good thing other people do!

[gadders]

If you're going to stop using stuff because a key person on the project is a bit of a dick, I assume you don't use anything via Linus or Apple-era Steve Jobs.

[enriquto]

Wait, why does a book reader ever need to "mount" anything? I don't understand.

[netule]

I'm guessing because it has extensive support for connecting and communicating to eBook readers like Kindle and the likes.

[toyg]

Yes, precisely. It’s actually very useful, since it can rearrange files on kindles etc.

[enriquto]

What a time to be alive.

I remember installing calibre once, because I needed to open an .epub file I had. Upon opening it, it started to "classify" stuff and build a sort of catalog, to which I kill -9'd it immediately and uninstalled it for good measure. But mounting filesystems is way, way worse than anything I imagined it was about to do!

[powersnail]

While the filesystem issue showed stubbornness, the fact that it tried to build a catalog is perfectly reasonable, given it is an ebook management software, which happens to include an epub reader.

You really can't blame a program to do what it says to do.

[enriquto]

I don't blame the program, I blame myself for installing a management software when all I wanted was an ebook viewer (and definitely NOT a management software of any kind).

[antientropic]

FYI: Calibre contains a program appropriately named "ebook-viewer" that allows you to view a file (like an epub) without all the library management stuff.

[bayindirh]

Calibre is much more than an eBook reader. It's more of an authoring / reading / management suite.

It can manage eBook readers' libraries either natively or via plugins. It can work with my Kobo eReader for example. I use Calibre to convert standard epubs to kepub (kobo enhanced epub) and push to device and extract highlights from books mainly. It's also a very nice ebook library so I can search and push/read/modify what I want.

[slightwinder]

Because it's not a book-reader, but a suit of tools for ebooks. Which includes managing them, receiving data from certain source, reading them, converting beetween different formats, automating certain managment-tasks, offering a web-interface as also desktop-interface, and finally also managing synchronisation with many many ebook-readers (for which the mounting is neccessary). And it BTW has a very elaborated plugin-system which allows to add even more that what it can do out of the box.

It's more justified to call it an IDE for Ebooks.

[Alopis]

My god, reading this makes me wish there was an alternative to Calibre. I already just tolerate it because it's the only ebook manager I know and there are a lot of things about the UI and how it works that bother me.

[renewiltord]

It's like OpenSSL. Everyone acted like they did a terrible job in the end, but either you had alternatives and you could have linked to gnutls or you decided that you didn't have alternatives and OpenSSL was irreplaceable. Either way, the product was just way too good.

[Alopis]

No, it just means it was acceptable. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its flaws that need to be addressed.

Making an ebook manager is a lot of effort for little reward, so I'm not surprised Calibre is the only one out there. I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to be unhappy with it regardless.

Man, the people here are unbelievable. Calibre isn't this unassailable icon where expressing displeasure about it is heresy. What was that post about people accepting that technology sucks? Calibre sucks. But people put up with it. But somehow I'm the asshole for expressing my dislike.

[gnur]

What features do you use the most? I'm looking to extend a personal project for searching epubs to be more featureful when compared to calibre.

[Alopis]

I mostly use the tags feature (though I wish this was better too), because I mainly use Calibre to organize my ebooks library.

[majkinetor]

My god, somebody did UI I don't like. Its barely tolerable, but I still use it because this world owes me and I can't sunken cost my precious time.

[dang]

This comment breaks the site guidelines and is a big step in exactly the opposite direction of what we want here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit closer to heart? Note that they include:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html