Collections file location

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call_a3
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Jun 17, 2012 7:21 am

Collections file location

Post by call_a3 »

I would really like it if an option could be added to save one of or all collections (the db files associated with it/them) at a location other than the default (which in my case is ~/.guayadeque/Collections/). That way, I could save some space in my home folder (the entire .guayadeque folder is taking up 1.8GB already, and I'm still expanding my music library) by placing the databases on an external drive (the same one my music is stored on).
An additional feature would then be to make this setup portable, meaning: I could take my extHD and plug it into another persons computer who also has guayadeque installed, and by simply pointing guayadeque to my collection on the extHD, I could access my library immediately (without first having to create a new library on the other computer and scanning my entire extHD).
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anonbeat
Posts: 2048
Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2010 9:47 pm

Collections file location

Post by anonbeat »

You can try with a symbolic link to the place you want to use for collections or for the whole configuration folder.
call_a3
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Jun 17, 2012 7:21 am

Collections file location

Post by call_a3 »

I forgot to check in with this post, so that's why my response is one month overdue :7
My issue with disk space recently came up again and I remembered that I asked a question related to that here some time ago.
I tried your suggestion today of using symlinks (I started by copying over the collection folders and not the entire .guayadeque folder) for the collections that are located on external drives. For now, this setup seems to work. (Actually I can't believe I didn't think of this myself, because it seems such an obvious solution now.)

Still, I might be nice to have be able to configurate this kind of setup from within guayadeque itself. E.g. now, if/when I would want to achieve the 'portable' effect, I would have to manually create (and destroy) the symlink to my extHD in the target machine's .guayadeque folder. Also I assume I would have to manually edit the guayadeque.conf file on the target machine to include the symlink as one of the available collections.
I'm not really pushing for this kind of functionality to be added very soon, but I just think it's a nice-to-have feature.

I also noticed that part of the problem was caused by the cache.db file getting very big, although there was no option (that I could find) to clear the cache in guayadeque itself nor to get any feedback on how big the cache had gotten. (So right now the only way to know that the cache file was 1.8 GB large was to look at it using the file manager/... and the only to do something about it was to shut down guayadeque and manually remove cache.db so guayadeque can automatically recreate an empty cache when you start it again.) What does the cache contain and is there any way to add automatic garbage collection on stale or infrequently used data?
call_a3
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Jun 17, 2012 7:21 am

Collections file location

Post by call_a3 »

A bug related to this method, although not completely unforseeable, I experienced was when I tried to start Guayadeque before the external hard drive was mounted. This caused Guayadeque to crash immediately during startup. Obviously I can't expect Guayadeque to function normally when this scenario occurs, but maybe some kind of gracefull degradation is possible: continue functioning with collections (that for some reason are not available) disabled and/or give a descriptive error message before closing Guayadeque that collection(s) X (,Y, ...) are not available.
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