[mythtv] Proposed alternate behaviour for show delete

[Brad Templeton]

Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 02:11:33PM -0500, Isaac Richards wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 March 2005 02:10 pm, Brad Templeton wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 02:05:45PM -0500, Isaac Richards wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 09 March 2005 01:22 am, Brad Templeton wrote:
> > > > Result: Delete can be undone, at least until the space is actually
> > > > needed.
> > > >
> > > > Thoughts?
> > >
> > > Doesn't make sense at all to me.  If I manually delete something (which
> > > rarely happens), I want it gone.  You can't accidently delete a program
> > > due to the extra 'are you sure' popup, unless you don't bother reading
> > > the screen.
> >
> > That's certainly not true.   Unlike you, I delete regularly as I am sure
> > do many others, once I have watched a program I know I don't intend to
> > watch again.   Autoexpire is actually a very rare event for me -- and was
> > on the Tivo except for suggestions which are of course constantly
> > autoexpiring there.
> >
> >
> > Because of that, the are-you-sure pop-up becomes close to meaningless.
> > It becomes the normal operation at end of program to, barely aware of what
> > your fingers are doing, delete and confirm.
> >
> > "Are you sure" prompts are well known in UI design to be a poor idea unless
> > they truly only happen for rare events.   Undo is far better.
> 
> Why do you manually delete things, if autoexpire is turned on?
> 
That's why I manually delete things, because autoexpire is turned on.

Some of this behaviour comes from being trained on the Tivo, where
autoexpire is always on, and the default is new programs replace old programs
etc.

Like many people my box records many shows of various levels of interest,
and there is not enough space to record everything.   If you run out of space,
you ideally want to get rid of shows accoring to how much you want to
watch them.   You can manually turn off autoexpire for a show of course to
indicate you particularly like it.

I'm trained in the view that if a show sat in the pool, for many
weeks, and I never tried to protect it, it's more prime for expire than
fresher shows.  That is one reason for autoexpire to cull the oldest shows
first.   

It would be terrible behaviour, however, if autoexpire were to
purge a show I was meaning to watch to keep a later show that I had already
watched.  

I do believe that an understanding of what has been watched and what has
not would indeed be a good metric for autoexpire, though it probably has to
be more complex than the patch submitted.


I would roughly sort the expire pools as follows:

    a) Never-expire shows       = 0
    b) Unwatched shows          = 100
    c) Watched shows            = 200
    d) "suggestions" (possibly more than one pool)  = 300
    e) Shows manually cleared for removal   +1000 to earlier number

Within each pool, one sorts by date, however there are some alternate
internal sorts which might make sense.   For example, explicit solo
recordings and non-rerun episodes might stand ahead of reruns and
find-all recordings.   Ie. if you explicitly asked for something, protect
it more.

Now as I have noted, the "expire is not optional, so delete what you know
you don't need to protect what you do" is one style of organizing your
disk space.   Some would rather the system not record a new show they
asked for to protect old shows.   Some just never delete as you suggest
and let auto-expire get rid of the shows.  Ideally we want to accomodate all.