Bug 450844

Summary: "Group by series" unflattens filesystem hierarchy, making it difficult to find anything
Product: [Applications] peruse Reporter: Nate Graham <nate>
Component: generalAssignee: Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen <admin>
Status: RESOLVED INTENTIONAL    
Severity: normal CC: remggovw
Priority: NOR Keywords: usability
Version First Reported In: master   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Other   
OS: Linux   
See Also: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450845
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments: How the filesystem organization is displayed

Description Nate Graham 2022-02-25 20:43:33 UTC
I have a "Books" folder in ~, with my books sorted into a few basic categories:

$ ls -l ~/Books
total 72
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 May  6  2020  Agriculture
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Apr  3  2018 'Building & Construction'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016  Comics
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate 12288 Nov 21  2016  Economics
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Jun 26  2019 'Engineering & Tech'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016  Fiction
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016 'Food & Fitness'
drwxr-xr-x. 6 nate nate  4096 Dec 31  2019 'Game books and rules'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Jan 29  2021 'Military weapons & tactics'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016 'Money & Finance'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Oct  1  2015  Persuasion
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016  Science
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016  Self-Improvement
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Mar 11  2021 'Sociology, Philosophy,  & politics'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Nov 21  2016 'Spirituality & Religion'
drwxr-xr-x. 2 nate nate  4096 Dec 17  2017 'Survival & Independence'

However I can't find a way to make Peruse just show this to me. Instead there are options to group by author, title, publisher, and keywords, which are not useful to me as they show no data. I'd like to just have a way to see the filesystem organization I've already set up.

For comparison, Elisa gives you the ability to this with its "Files" view.
Comment 1 Nate Graham 2022-02-25 22:19:47 UTC
Ohh I see, "Group by series" does this, but it unflattens the hierarchy, so all the folders are displayed as if they share the same parent item, even if they don't.

This seems sub-optimal. It's also not what I would expect "group by series" to do.
Comment 2 Nate Graham 2022-02-25 22:20:36 UTC
Created attachment 147126 [details]
How the filesystem organization is displayed

All of these folders live in different places, and some are even inside other ones, but they are all presented as a flatttened alphabetized grid.
Comment 3 Remko van Wagensveld 2022-07-16 17:37:10 UTC
This behavior of series is intended as far as I see. This is for structures where you have multiple comics of the same series in one folder. E.g.:

$ tree All-New*
All-New\ Hawkeye\ (2015)
|-- All-New_Hawkeye_2015_1.cbz
`-- All-New_Hawkeye_2015_6.cbz
All-New\ Ultimates\ (2014)
|-- All-New_Ultimates_2014_1.cbz
`-- All-New,_All-Different_Avengers_2015_9.cbz

This helps if the Comic Book Archives do not have any metadata embedded describing the comic.
What you are suggesting would be a folder browser in peruse. In general I would like a folder browser, but that is a new feature, as the "Group by series" works as intended.

The code for adding the folder as a series is here:
https://invent.kde.org/graphics/peruse/-/blob/master/src/qtquick/BookListModel.cpp#L244

However, what I think is a problem with this feature is that the folder name gets added as series even if the comic book has the appropriate series information.
Comment 4 Nate Graham 2022-07-19 15:26:18 UTC
> What you are suggesting would be a folder browser in peruse.

Indeed, I think that is what I want. My books are all organized by filesystem and don't generally have correct metadata, so any of these views that organize by extracted metadata don't really work for me. There is a "Filter by folder" view but it doesn't really seem to work the way I would expect. See Bug 450845.