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The main developer of Calibre has had a long history of arrogant statements like that. Most famously illustrated in this bug report thread https://bugs.launchpa

The main developer of Calibre has had a long history of arrogant statements like that. Most famously illustrated in this bug report thread https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 It's like...how many times do security researchers have to exploit your code (and your many "fixes") before you change your program's mounting architecture? I read this bug report when I want to feel something.

Alopis 6y ago
My god, reading this makes me wish there was an alternative to Calibre. I already just tolerate it because it's the only ebook manager I know and there are a lot of things about the UI and how it works that bother me.
- gnur 6y ago
  What features do you use the most? I'm looking to extend a personal project for searching epubs to be more featureful when compared to calibre.
  - Alopis 6y ago
    I mostly use the tags feature (though I wish this was better too), because I mainly use Calibre to organize my ebooks library.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  It's like OpenSSL. Everyone acted like they did a terrible job in the end, but either you had alternatives and you could have linked to gnutls or you decided that you didn't have alternatives and OpenSSL was irreplaceable. Either way, the product was just way too good.
  - Alopis 6y ago
    No, it just means it was acceptable. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its flaws that need to be addressed. Making an ebook manager is a lot of effort for little reward, so I'm not surprised Calibre is the only one out there. I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to be unhappy with it regardless. Man, the people here are unbelievable. Calibre isn't this unassailable icon where expressing displeasure about it is heresy. What was that post about people accepting that technology sucks? Calibre sucks. But people put up with it. But somehow I'm the asshole for expressing my dislike.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  My god, somebody did UI I don't like. Its barely tolerable, but I still use it because this world owes me and I can't sunken cost my precious time.
  - Alopis 6y ago
    My god, somebody being an insufferable prick on HN. Why am I not surprised.
    - dang 6y ago
      Your comment upthread already crossed into that. The other commenter shouldn't have broken the site guidelines worse. And you shouldn't have escalated like this. We're looking for curious, thoughtful conversation on this site. Calling other users "an insufferable prick" is so extremely far from that (regardless of how unfair or provocative someone else was) that I'm going to ban you again. You've also posted quite good comments, so obviously I don't want to ban you, but the container here is fragile and comments like this one and some of your others are just too destructive. If you decide you want to use HN as intended, starting with "Be kind. Don't be snarky" and including the rest of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to unban you.
  - dang 6y ago
    This comment breaks the site guidelines and is a big step in exactly the opposite direction of what we want here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit closer to heart? Note that they include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
enriquto 6y ago
Wait, why does a book reader ever need to "mount" anything? I don't understand.
- netule 6y ago
  I'm guessing because it has extensive support for connecting and communicating to eBook readers like Kindle and the likes.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    What a time to be alive. I remember installing calibre once, because I needed to open an .epub file I had. Upon opening it, it started to "classify" stuff and build a sort of catalog, to which I kill -9'd it immediately and uninstalled it for good measure. But mounting filesystems is way, way worse than anything I imagined it was about to do!
    - powersnail 6y ago
      While the filesystem issue showed stubbornness, the fact that it tried to build a catalog is perfectly reasonable, given it is an ebook management software, which happens to include an epub reader. You really can't blame a program to do what it says to do.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        I don't blame the program, I blame myself for installing a management software when all I wanted was an ebook viewer (and definitely NOT a management software of any kind).
        antientropic 6y ago
        FYI: Calibre contains a program appropriately named "ebook-viewer" that allows you to view a file (like an epub) without all the library management stuff.
  - 6y ago
square_usual 6y ago
Yeah, he is... a character, to say the least. It's a shame because outside of Konsole, Kitty is the closest thing to iTerm in the linux space. what's holding it back from being as powerful and usable is basically not having a UI at all, and he's opposed to having more GUI at all, like on this very basic feature: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1402 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1402
- dotancohen 6y ago
  Have you tried Konsole, the KDE terminal. It is absolutely terrific. It handles RTL and multibyte characters perfectly, works with tmux, has monitoring for both activity and silence, renamable tabs, horizontal and vertical splitting, bookmarks, scrolling, colour support, on-the-fly font resizing and colour scheme switching, keyboard shortcuts that do not conflict with any *sh, copy and paste shortcuts for both the normal clipboard and the X11 clipboard, supports the mouse, search functionality, I could probably go on. If iTerm has any feature that I'm missing, I'd love to hear about it.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    I mention it in GP! It's what I'm using, since I use my mouse heavily to get my setup, and Kitty just isn't for mouse users.
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      Oops, yup, I see it now!
  - yewenjie 6y ago
    I wish I knew how to fit all these features of an advanced terminal to my use cases.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      Good thing other people do!
nikbackm 6y ago
That's almost 9 years old now. Maybe time to let it go? Unless there are more recent examples to point to. Or the problem still is not fixed.
gadders 6y ago
If you're going to stop using stuff because a key person on the project is a bit of a dick, I assume you don't use anything via Linus or Apple-era Steve Jobs.
slightwinder 6y ago
> The main developer of Calibre has had a long history of arrogant statements like that. Most famously illustrated in this bug report thread https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 That's more ignorance that arrogance. He fixed what he understood, and discussed what he did not understood till he found a satisfying solution. Personally I wouldn't trust a dev who fixes stuff blindly which they don't understand. Though, in case of security this of course can have also bad outcomes, as illustrated in this case in the process. But that makes it even more important for everyone to follow through and communicate clearly. Which did happen here at the end.

Alopis 6y ago

My god, reading this makes me wish there was an alternative to Calibre. I already just tolerate it because it's the only ebook manager I know and there are a lot of things about the UI and how it works that bother me.

gnur 6y ago
What features do you use the most? I'm looking to extend a personal project for searching epubs to be more featureful when compared to calibre.
- Alopis 6y ago
  I mostly use the tags feature (though I wish this was better too), because I mainly use Calibre to organize my ebooks library.
renewiltord 6y ago
It's like OpenSSL. Everyone acted like they did a terrible job in the end, but either you had alternatives and you could have linked to gnutls or you decided that you didn't have alternatives and OpenSSL was irreplaceable. Either way, the product was just way too good.
- Alopis 6y ago
  No, it just means it was acceptable. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its flaws that need to be addressed. Making an ebook manager is a lot of effort for little reward, so I'm not surprised Calibre is the only one out there. I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to be unhappy with it regardless. Man, the people here are unbelievable. Calibre isn't this unassailable icon where expressing displeasure about it is heresy. What was that post about people accepting that technology sucks? Calibre sucks. But people put up with it. But somehow I'm the asshole for expressing my dislike.
majkinetor 6y ago
My god, somebody did UI I don't like. Its barely tolerable, but I still use it because this world owes me and I can't sunken cost my precious time.
- Alopis 6y ago
  My god, somebody being an insufferable prick on HN. Why am I not surprised.
  - dang 6y ago
    Your comment upthread already crossed into that. The other commenter shouldn't have broken the site guidelines worse. And you shouldn't have escalated like this. We're looking for curious, thoughtful conversation on this site. Calling other users "an insufferable prick" is so extremely far from that (regardless of how unfair or provocative someone else was) that I'm going to ban you again. You've also posted quite good comments, so obviously I don't want to ban you, but the container here is fragile and comments like this one and some of your others are just too destructive. If you decide you want to use HN as intended, starting with "Be kind. Don't be snarky" and including the rest of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you're welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to unban you.
- dang 6y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines and is a big step in exactly the opposite direction of what we want here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit closer to heart? Note that they include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

enriquto 6y ago

Wait, why does a book reader ever need to "mount" anything? I don't understand.

netule 6y ago
I'm guessing because it has extensive support for connecting and communicating to eBook readers like Kindle and the likes.
- enriquto 6y ago
  What a time to be alive. I remember installing calibre once, because I needed to open an .epub file I had. Upon opening it, it started to "classify" stuff and build a sort of catalog, to which I kill -9'd it immediately and uninstalled it for good measure. But mounting filesystems is way, way worse than anything I imagined it was about to do!
  - powersnail 6y ago
    While the filesystem issue showed stubbornness, the fact that it tried to build a catalog is perfectly reasonable, given it is an ebook management software, which happens to include an epub reader. You really can't blame a program to do what it says to do.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      I don't blame the program, I blame myself for installing a management software when all I wanted was an ebook viewer (and definitely NOT a management software of any kind).
      - antientropic 6y ago
        FYI: Calibre contains a program appropriately named "ebook-viewer" that allows you to view a file (like an epub) without all the library management stuff.
- 6y ago

square_usual 6y ago

Yeah, he is... a character, to say the least. It's a shame because outside of Konsole, Kitty is the closest thing to iTerm in the linux space. what's holding it back from being as powerful and usable is basically not having a UI at all, and he's opposed to having more GUI at all, like on this very basic feature: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1402 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1402

dotancohen 6y ago
Have you tried Konsole, the KDE terminal. It is absolutely terrific. It handles RTL and multibyte characters perfectly, works with tmux, has monitoring for both activity and silence, renamable tabs, horizontal and vertical splitting, bookmarks, scrolling, colour support, on-the-fly font resizing and colour scheme switching, keyboard shortcuts that do not conflict with any *sh, copy and paste shortcuts for both the normal clipboard and the X11 clipboard, supports the mouse, search functionality, I could probably go on. If iTerm has any feature that I'm missing, I'd love to hear about it.
- square_usual 6y ago
  I mention it in GP! It's what I'm using, since I use my mouse heavily to get my setup, and Kitty just isn't for mouse users.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    Oops, yup, I see it now!
- yewenjie 6y ago
  I wish I knew how to fit all these features of an advanced terminal to my use cases.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    Good thing other people do!

nikbackm 6y ago

That's almost 9 years old now. Maybe time to let it go? Unless there are more recent examples to point to. Or the problem still is not fixed.

gadders 6y ago

If you're going to stop using stuff because a key person on the project is a bit of a dick, I assume you don't use anything via Linus or Apple-era Steve Jobs.

slightwinder 6y ago

> The main developer of Calibre has had a long history of arrogant statements like that. Most famously illustrated in this bug report thread https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027 That's more ignorance that arrogance. He fixed what he understood, and discussed what he did not understood till he found a satisfying solution. Personally I wouldn't trust a dev who fixes stuff blindly which they don't understand. Though, in case of security this of course can have also bad outcomes, as illustrated in this case in the process. But that makes it even more important for everyone to follow through and communicate clearly. Which did happen here at the end.