autopar needs to clean up after itself

[tazmeister]

In a download list - anything in the list means that item is unfinished
but yet by putting and leaving autopar entries in the download list, those lines have a totally different meaning

So for autopar if everything checks out, that entry must be removed from the list as well
Instead it just leaves tons of partly full bars in a list that is supposed to be empty once everything has been completed

Are there any actual plans to fix this or is it going to be left messed up either until a new major release or for ever?

Change is good when it improves things, but when it so obviously breaks a usage paradigm it's not such a good thing

There are all sorts of ways to address the overall mess that's been created, the question is will any of them actually be implemented?

Basically, how do you tell by looking at the download list, if everything is actually done?
The way the download list now works it's not really possible without expanding each item and even then it's not consistent
Autopar has never clearly indicated when an item was complete or done or whatever

[Quade]

What version are you using?

[tazmeister]

I've seen this in B8 B9 and B11
I'm about to switch to B12

The thing is autopar has never been good about keeping a clean list of it's progress
it's just not been a problem because the messed up list was always in a separate tab.
Now I can't ignore all the entries it leaves around

Sometimes it just doesn't finish repairing
Sometimes I'm not sure what it's status really is, but If I run quickpar some of those times everything is there and intact so it looks like autopar just didn't update the fact that it was done
sometimes I can run quickpar and it autopar hasn't repaired the files and it hasn't downloaded any of the extra pars it knows about
and so on
I've been using this app for years, and autopar has always been unreliable
but like I pointed out above it didn't matter too much because the spam it left didn't obscure the download list

When it worked I was happy, when it didn't work though it didn't bother me mostly because there are actually a huge number of possible cases it actually has to handle if it is expected to work all the time. At least when it didn't complete or something, I knew that the app at least had finished downloading everything it thought it needed, so I could then finish the repair by hand

I think 5.59 (maybe just the betas) newbin wasn't actually storing a list of extra pars. This sucked because I had to search for the posts to find the pars again
this has been fixed, though I don't like having those extras in the download list since it still breaks the old paradigm that items in the DL list are items it will definitely still be downloading

Basically, there are times where autopar just doesn't start checking even if a par2 file was downloaded
sometimes though NB didn't download the first par2 even though it was selected so autopar didn't start
then sometimes autopar just stopped partway though the repair or the check for no apparent reason
sometimes it incorrectly thought something was broken so it would download all the extra pars
sometimes it would correctly notice a problem but would never start downloading the pars
and so
I think I've seen just about every combination of final state plus correct or incorrect response to that state occur

I just figured that it was understood that autopar could never get things right 100% of time since there are so many minor ways someone can mess with how they create their pars, and each of this ways potentially requires a complete set of code to check for that state and handle it
Overall autopar works the majority of the time in the sense that it does fix the files and unarchives things if needed, on the other hand I'd guess that it correctly updated the UI after the fact less than half the time

For me, as long as it didn't mess things up and didn't force me to look at the >50% incorrect list of autopar statuses I was fine with it

But by removing the autopar tab and moving that inaccurate list of to the DL list, it's impossible to ignore the issue and it screws up trying to check on the status of the download

NOTE: the download is a definitely a separate thing from the check/repair/extraction process
It's fine to have some sort of list that covers the end to end workflow, but I really rely on having a distinct display of the state of just the download phase
mostly because the app doesn't get the subsequent parts right reliably and I doubt anyone will ever write an app that manages that just because of the huge range of possible ways someone can post a set of files plus pars

[tazmeister]

Ok, I Just switched to B12

I added a bunch of junk to download and so far at least it has been clearing out completed autopar rows

which just made me realize something else I liked about having an autopar tab that wasn't being cleared

If something is downloaded, and autopar works, there's is nothing to indicate this after fact
So if you leave the app unattended, there is no visible difference between autopar not running at all and autopar reporting success

The only indication that autopar actually did something occurs if autopar doesn't work right
or if the things downloaded were in an archive and autopar extracted it
if the files were not in an archive then there is nothing to indicate after the fact that autopar actually checked the files and found them to be complete
which is ok if you fully trust that the app did the right thing, but if historically you've seen autopar not always work like I have, then you really want a list somewhere that just displays autopar status for everything it has attempted and an entry for all successes and for all errors

I'll post more later after this large chunk of things is downloaded

[Quade]

If something is downloaded, and autopar works, there's is nothing to indicate this after fact
So if you leave the app unattended, there is no visible difference between autopar not running at all and autopar reporting success

I'd say new files in the files list is a pretty good indicator. If the unrar or repair fails, the files stay in the download list. You can then check them with properties or quickpar.