Allow news recipe "author" field

[Keith Beckman]

Version: 1.37.0
OS: All

To support automatic news deletion, calibre has depended on news books created from recipes having both the "News" tag and "calibre" as the only author. While this was the most efficient way to implement automatic deletion on the old databased API, the new API is capable of supporting much better functionality.

The new API's `tags_older_than` is capable of matching single authors on multiple-author books. The `add_news` method should be altered to reflect this. Recipes should be permitted to have an "author" string field or an "authors" list field. Upon adding the book to the library, `add_news` should concatenate all provided authors, along with the author "calibre" joined with the " & " string to create a multiple-author string as recognised by calibre.

Allowing news recipes to specify an author would increase their usability (especially for blogs), while not interfering with automatic deletion of old news.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

This is not worth the effort for me personally. If some one else wants to implement it, I will be happy to supply any needed guidance. If so, re-open the ticket and we can discuss it.

 status wontfix

[Keith Beckman (kbeckman)]

I'll be happy to work on this feature. I've already delved through the code to track down the info for this report quite a bit, and it looks like I'll have create a search routine that would find both current-style saved news and new-style.

I'd actually like to implement the new tagging as a custom metadata field if possible, which would reduce the likelihood of a user accidentally making files unrecognizable to the cleanup routine.

Another idea I have is to tag files with a "delete if older than days" field, which would override the global setting and would be set from the recipe. (Though it'd be have to stored in the generated file in some way that add_news could get at it, since I don't want to force add_news to look at the recipe directly and break encapsulation.)

[Keith Beckman (kbeckman)]

(I don't have permissions to reopen this directly, or I'd've done so.)

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

If all you want to do is add some extra metadata to the recipe, simply select the recipe in the Fetch News dialog and click the Advanced tab. There you can specify extra tags to be added to the recipe and also a custom delete if older than field.