General findings and questions about unstable build

[retmas-gh]

I've had some time and seeing as you have added a new interesing functionality I've ran and tested the latest unstable build (abafd054846c) and I have following findings/questions:

• the library reading options are not applied in this build (it was fixed in nightly a while ago); are things like these supposed to be in unstable or is this mainly for new futures and you keep bug fixes of already released things in mind for now and I should not be pointing things like this in the future?
• after adding four libraries one after another, only the first one finished the library_scan task (which took 12 minutes), the rest
  were left at a queued status; rescaning manually the libraries were filled with content; after trying to cancel the queued tasks in
  jobs (after about two hours of starting), the toast showed an error but the task was marked as cancelled after a few seconds
• while adding metadata to a series, I mistakenly set a volume which I can not delete (tried empty value which does not let me save, and 0, which ends informing me the value needs to be no less than 1); you mentioned that you can "undo" edits by a rescan but:
• • I did library>settings>scanning>configure scan>custom>toggled "rebuild metadata" and nothing was cleared (only set summary, title, volume and status on "series" level and genres and volume on "book" level)
• • if I do such a scan as above, I assume all the values I've set would be lost (unless saved to a book, bit more about my use case below)
• in the future when saving the metadata to a book will be a thing, what will happen if the book is read only? will it error out or will it still save to just the database?
  I personally am running stump using docker and have the library mounted as read only (I don't like having my curated media be available for writing to "publicly" accesible applications [nothing against stump here, I do this for ie. jellyfin too])
• the metadata values of "Genres", "Links" and authors are something that interests me quite a bit, but they are available to be set only on the "book" level; are your planning to add these to the "series" level too?
  I don't read western comics but I assume generaly every "book" is it's own invidual entry, hence such metada entries do fit here, but for the media I personaly use it's generaly a bunch of "books/volumes" per series with overarching theme/genre, writer, artist etc. staying the same, so a per series metadata would be more applicable

[aaronleopold]

Hey, first a big thank you for finding all these issues and letting me know. I really appreciate it! There is a reason it's named unstable. I'll be sure to look into all of the things mentioned:

• It sounds like a regression, the unstable branch isn't perfectly up to date with nightly but I try to merge back any fixes to it. There are often many conflicts when doing so in the code, so it's very likely I just either missed something or introduced a bug by merging
• It sounds like the job itself works fine but there is something funky with the queueing system
• The manual edit problem will be easy to fix (to make the form allow empty), I'll just have to look more into it. When I've tested, I've run Force rebuild scans to clear the metadata.
  • Yes, if it worked as intended the assumption is you lose any custom edits
• If the book is read only it would just error and not save. I envisioned a two-step process, where writing back is opt-in and happens after a database save. So really if you don't care for writes it wouldn't matter (you just wouldn't opt-in). Also mounting as read only makes sense, I do the same. Pretty much all features on Stump which would require write were added for others, I don't personally use them either.
• We can definitely add genres and links to series-level metadata, I don't have any explicit plans because nobody has asked for more things to be added

[retmas-gh]

• I understand and will try to report things that I know should be working if I find anything in the future
• The only thing I can add to the queue problem is that elapsed time is all zeroes but i guess that's a given since it's queued
• Some kind of metadata entry deletion would be nice, otherwise I will be left with manually editing the database because for sure I will not be rescaning media to lose my database-only metadata (if it ever works like that) 😄
• I've ran Force rebuild and it did not remove the manually added metadata either; my "books" don't have any embedded though so I guess it does not actually remove the database entries if the book itself does not have said metadata entry? If so, some delete action for an entry would be even more welcome for such use cases
• About writing back being an opt-in, that's a good idea from my point of view as well
• About the metadata in series, it would be nice to have at least these:
  • Characters
  • Genres
  • Links
  • Series
  • Writers
  • Inker (here I'm not sure; an Artist field would fit best but as to not introduce additional things I think this is what would be used as an substitute)
• As an additional point regarding the above, it would be nice if these things would be shown in the series overview (akin to the book overview) at /series/<id>
• Also, I guess if one were to add the same metadata fields in both series and books, a question would be what to show when you land in the book overview (whether to only show book metadata or joined and deduplicated data of both series and a book)

[aaronleopold]

An update for what I've done during my lunch today:

1. I found the queue issue 👍
2. I added functionality around deleting metadata. See screenshot below
3. I've added support for most of the metadata you requested, I omited inkers for now until we are more certain

Also to address your edits:

it would be nice if these things would be shown in the series overview (akin to the book overview) at /series/

Yeah I mentioned in the PR for this feature I really dislike the disconnect I've created. The problem is that there isn't really a series overview page, there are only those tabs (i.e., series books, files, and settings). My assumption is that most people go to a series in order to get to a book, so adding an overview between felt like an extra step or barrier. Not really sure though, honestly.

I guess if one were to add the same metadata fields in both series and books, a question would be what to show when you land in the book overview

This is something I also thought about when adding the fields you requested. I don't know if people would prefer these to be more like aggregates pulled from the media in the series (i.e., characters pulled from books, not explicitly set on series) but making it an explicit field on series means you can set it for the series overall without writing it to each book. It's easy enough to revert, but I think it just requires more user feedback.

As far as the updates go mentioned above, I'll likely not be able to get them into another unstable build until tomorrow. I'll respond here after I do, though

[retmas-gh]

To be honest, metadata deletion from the screenshot is something entirely else than I thought of - I would just like a way to remove invidual metadata entries (that were, for example, mistakenly added manualy), just as it is possible for entries you add with a plus sign to be removed; this relates to entries of textarea/input/input type="number" type (we talked about volume only before).
That said, having and option to narrow metadata refresh/deletion to a series/book itself is not a bad idea as another option too - just not something that I would use personaly and probably adds a burden of maintenance for you.

About the series/book disconnect - this is once again, I think, the problem of "wester comics" versus "asian comics"; having the metadata on a series level makes more sense in the later case.
I proposed such an idea because the title and summary are already applied on that level so I though adding new entries wouldn't be a problem; an idea i though of would be something like:

This is just an inspect editor mockup I quickly put.

If such a prospect would come to frutition, I think in the series overview (not the series metadata itself), merging the series and books in that series metadata "values" of every kind of a "key" that is set and displayed, then deduplicating them would be the best case in my opinion; the book overview should be left as is.
Also, it would also be nice if clicking on invidual "values" of a "key" in the series overview would lead to a series with such a tag, not a book (don't know if that's possible with current filters).

As an additional idea - wouldn't a Status be better as some kind of dropdown? Are there any other values here besides "Ongoing/Completed/Cancelled" that would go there? Or did you just not want to create a special case for just one tag :)

[aaronleopold]

Haha okay I think I understand, so you basically just wanted something like a quick delete for an individual entry. I'll try and add that, makes sense 👍

As far as this series overview stuff goes, I'll keep thinking on it. I definitely agree in general and don't like the disconnect. One thing I thought of kinda combines a few different other feature requests recently:

• [FEATURE] Library and File Explorer (Files tab) Improvements #718
• [FEATURE] Optionally disable "Series" view or Series organization altogether per library #697

I think maybe we could add a new Overview tab which can be disabled or set as the default route for a library. The awkward bit would be making it work with #697, but I've also been thinking of that a good bit separately lately and think the best move might be to introduce some kind of semantic split between ebooks and other (e.g., comics, manga, etc) that presents books by author then series within a library. Just kinda dumping thoughts that aren't really related lol

As an additional idea - wouldn't a Status be better as some kind of dropdown?

Yeah good call out, I'll swap it out for a select 👍 It wasn't an intentional decision to have it as a text input, just an oversight

[retmas-gh]

I thought about splits of some kind too but didn't mention it since that would be a lot of work for you to support things you are probably not really interested in / do not fit your usage flow.

To provide my use case, I only ever use Library>Series>Books flow, having visited Library>Books, Library>Files and Library>Series>Files only once at the very beginning to find out what it does :)

About the series overview. I guess for now I can just add the metadata I want at the very beginning of the summary - not ideal since it's kept kind of short and there is no interaction with links to filters but there is zero work from you needed for this.
EDIT: Actually, one more thing here: book summary is a textarea while the series summary is an input - would be nice if both were the type of the former lol

Since that's about all from me on this whole topic in the current state of things, I guess I will just close the discussion and wait patiently for the changes discussed.

Thank you!