Proposal for Auto Download Redesign

[ByteHamster]

Sorry, it took a while because the text is really long and because the redesign is coupled with quite a few difficult decisions.

@peakvalleytech

Overtime other features were added without a proper redisgn leading to our current need for a complete rework.

Yup, that’s the main problem with auto download

@peakvalleytech

replacing it with a feed specific setting ‘keep last N episodes’

I think the reworked setting should be in some way backwards compatible. Otherwise, we risk a bunch of complaints by users. So there should be a way to set it up that is “close enough” to the current behavior (whatever that means).

@peakvalleytech

Soft meanig that the will not eforce that epsidoes passed N will not be allowed. The setting only makes sure the last N episodes are downloaded. No assumtions will be made about episodes past N. This will be entirely managed by a seperate episode auto delete feature.

Sounds good to me but I think there still needs to be some kind of global setting. We also have a request somewhere to limit the total auto-downloaded episodes by storage space, which doesn’t really make sense on a per-subscription basis.

@peakvalleytech

This means auto deleting will now only be found and set under one location (maybe storage settings).

I like that it is decoupled. Still, I wonder how it would work in the UI. Would there be two independent per-subscription settings to set the numbers for auto download and auto delete? I don’t really see a use case for two different numbers there. Then we would need to come up with a good name, though.

@peakvalleytech

Have a defaultl N setting and a retain the gobal setting to turn on auto download for all feeds

If you are subscribed to, say, 10 feeds but 5 of them are “dead” (no longer produce new episodes), setting the default N could be confusing. I like the idea though. Not sure how to tweak it for clarity.

@peakvalleytech

It will implment many of the suggestions regarding finer control of auto delete

When auto delete is set to something like “episodes older than x days, independently of listened or not”, this would overwrite auto-download, right? So even if it is in the top N episodes, it doesn’t get downloaded. When now increasing the N, we need to make sure that we don’t download all N episodes and immediately delete them afterwards (that’s the advantage of having the features coupled: they work together. Still, I think it is better to decouple)