Database backend

[Adam Ehlers Nyholm Thomsen]

This is an alternative backend for the dosage system. It works by offering an alternative to Comic called DBComic. This saves the information about a strip to a database rather than saving the strip itself. Currently the supplied database functions use the sqlite3 library supplied with Python 2.5 and has only been tested with this version of Python.

The idea is that with this patch dosage can serve as the backend for functionality similar to ComicAlert!

It does not replace the standard workings of dosage, rather it adds an additional option to mainline, which when passed activates the database backend.

Currently the database backend still downloads all strips because it has to hash them. This means that even if there is no update the backend will download the first strip of each comic. This "wasted" bandwidth can be reclaimed by using a caching proxy such as Squid.

Another way to implement similar functionality would be an event handler. But if it is implemented as an event handler it will require the user to keep a complete mirror of all the comics, which might not be of interest.

Comments greatly appreciated.

[Adam Ehlers Nyholm Thomsen (adament)]

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