Calibre

Calibre is a somewhat popular eBook management package that's also free software. http://calibre-ebook.com/

Install via # apt-get install calibre

There is a somewhat unfortunate interaction between Calibre and git-annex...

  • git-annex makes its files become read-only. By the way, that's not quite obvious from the documentation; I suggest making that more prominent.
  • Calibre modifies files (not quite sure of semantics, how, or why) when doing various operations, notably such as when copying a book from one's library to one's portable reading device.

These don't play well together, sadly.

I'd expect most of the issue to sit on the Calibre side, and have reported it as a bug. Calibre bug #739045 Preliminary indication is that they're treating it as a functionality change they'll decline to fix. Which isn't entirely unreasonable - I anticipated as much, and I don't want to treat that as a bad/wrong decision.

However, I think it's: * Unfortunate, as fitting Calibre together with git-annex seems like a neat idea. * Useful to make sure that this kind of "doesn't play well together" condition is documented, even if only as a bug report.

Maybe I will run into issues myself somewhere down the road, but generally speaking, I really really like the fact that files are immutable by default.
One option would be to use the new sharebox a FUSE filesystem for git-annex, which would hide the immutable file details from Calibre, and proxy any changes it made through to git-annex as a series of git annex unlock; modify; git-annex lock
Comment by http://joey.kitenet.net/ Thu Mar 31 19:32:25 2011
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