Bug#842651: skip empty files

[Bálint Réczey]

Control: tags -1 upstream

Hi Antoine,

2016-10-31 4:00 GMT+01:00 Antoine Beaupré <anarcat at debian.org>:
> 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:

I think the approach of skipping empty files is reasonable and I
suggest sharing the patch with upstream. They seem to be open
to patches improving the user experience.

Regarding the Debian package I would like to keep the code as
close to upstream's state as possible and while I would like to
please users, too, I'm hesitant to applying the patch only in
Debian.

>
> 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.

I hope the tests went well. :-)

Cheers,
Balint