To trigger the bug:
* Select a podcast you are subscribed to, with some episodes already downloaded. A list is shown of episodes that are available at the podcast provider, with more information available on those that have already been downloaded.
* Right-click on an episode that has already been downloaded. Select the option to delete the podcast. A dialog box with three buttons will pop up. One is Cancel. Another says "Delete the episode only". The other says "Delete the episode and the file"
At this point, many people will wonder what exactly is "the episode" and what is "the file". This should really be clarified.
* If the option "delete episode and file" is chosen, that episode's
entry disappears from the list. Presumably, the sound file has also
been erased from the file system.
* If the option "delete episode only" is chosen, that episode's entry disappears from the list. The sound file remains somewhere in the file system, but where, or why, is not really clear. *I* do know the file is somewhere below the folder that has been chosen for podcast downloads, but I doubt that a naive user will easily find it; and even then, finding the lost episode in its folder is very difficult, because filenames for soundfiles are not the same as episode names. And, in any case, there are no options to add it again to Rhythmbox.
If I wanted to recover disk space by deleting old episodes, I'd have to use the "delete episode and file" option, but then all references to those episodes would be forever lost, with no way offered to download again. There should be an option to delete the sound file only, that still left me with the entry in the index. Or an option to reload the full list of available episodes.
If I want to clear the episode index by erasing the oldest ones, the two current options would do, However, "delete episode only" will leave difficult to purge sound files dormant in the filesystem. And Rhythmbox offers no way to download the full episode list again from the provider.
The other problem is when a podcast download does not finish successfully: In those cases, a partial file may be kept by Rhythmbox, but there is no way to resume the download, and there is no way to delete the incomplete file and then fully reload, because the podcast index entry would be irrecoverably deleted with the sound file.
That's why I say that to correct the problem, the options in the dialog should be:
* Delete soundfile only
* Delete soundfile and index entry.
AND there should be an option in the podcast menu to refresh the full episode list. Currently, the podcast refresh option only gets the index entries for NEW episodes.
With these three changes, it would be easy to recover disk space by only deleting the soundfiles; it would be easy to redo failed downloads, by deleting the failed soundfile and downloading again; and it would be easy to get rid of old episodes, but the possibility would remain to get at them again.