Bug#842651: skip empty files

[Antoine Beaupré]

Source: kodi
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

Hi,

I am a heavy user of git-annex. In case you are unfamiliar with the
software, it's a tool to allow easier archiving of large files, using
git as a backend. Files are not stored directly in git, but rather, as
symlinks to real object files.

https://git-annex.branchable.com/

On my laptop, i have a part of my main video library that resides on
another machine. This means that some of those symlinks (the majority
of them, in fact) are broken symlinks.

Yet Kodi happily parses those files as if they were present, and shows
them as real movies when I try to select them. When I do, Kodi says
that the file is missing from the library and oh, do I want to remove
it?

This is a bit annoying. It seems to me empty files are obviously
invalid and should just not show up in the interface.

I looked at implementing a workaround for this by patching Kodi to
ignore empty file sets. I am not very familiar with the internals of
Kodi, but I hope I have found the right place to make such a change. I
am in the process of rebuilding a backport with the patch to test this
(which takes a long time!) but I thought I would share the patch here
to get more feedback.

I am hesitant in sharing directly with upstream because I am afraid
they will refuse supporting my exotic (git-annex) configuration: I
have in the past been told that my video library wasn't curated the
right way and their parser was expecting certain things to be stored
in a certain way (e.g. movie file titles in a certain ways, and so
on). The problem is changing the way git-annex works is even harder:
there is an issue opened on that side as well, but it's unfortunately
not seeing a lot of movement either, being a major architectural
change:

https://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/hide_missing_files/

So I figured a 2-line patch in Kodi would fix my immediate problem
provided that, of course, it works at all. :)

I'll give more information when my tests are complete.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.6
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.7.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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