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by KennyBlanken 951 days ago
The releases are frequent in part because Goyal refuses to separate all the content-based stuff (parsers for online news sources, for example) from the application.

This is an extra pain in the ass for users because if your favorite news site parser breaks, you have no choice but to upgrade Calibre itself instead of just updating a config file.

At a minimum the news-parsing stuff should have long ago been split out into a plugin. It has nothing to do with calibre's function as an ebook library tool.

2 comments

The updates have nothing to do with news parsers. News parsers are loaded dynamically, every time they are used. So are metadata downloading plugins. So are get books stores. Indeed almost all code that parses data from the web in calibre is loaded dynamically independent of calibre updates. The calibre developer whom you so blithely complain about here actually jumps through a million hoops to make sure those bits of calibre remain backward compatible with version of calibre and therefore python, going back a decade and more.
I agree with you but I also think that calibre should have update patches instead of downloading and installing 100mb file every 2 weeks. Calibre comes with its own python it is mostly self contained so it would be great if we had a choice for downloading just an update patch. I don't think this is something Kovid has the time though he probably could do it. It's the same problem when he was not willing earlier to move to python 3 as the amount of man hours required vs maintaining Python2 for calibre himself was easier. But someone came along and started porting calibre to python 3 and Kovid used their help to move to python 3. So if a dev comes along with better way to update calibre Kovid will probably accept it but as it is not a priority for him he might not ever get around to doing it himself.
This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules. If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.
> This is something I often tell my friends who complain about Calibre: his project his rules.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this. I certainly don't, nor did I say anything to the contrary.

> If you think there are genuine pain points you can address, fork it and make a better one no one is stopping you.

The only thing stopping me is common sense.