RSS Plugin - Final Release

[SatNav]

I've been working on the Plugin for most of the last week, and at this point it is pretty much complete.

But first I'll address the two bugs I pointed out when releasing the first version:

1. The missing handle error - I've come to suspect (after running deluge in terminal almost constantly for well over a week) that this is a general deluge bug - since it doesn't always happen with RSS torrents, and I've seen it happen with torrents that I've loaded in the normal way.

2. The date thing - I haven't been able to think of a good way round this one. It basically means that if you create a new filter for a recently checked feed, it won't pick up any entries that were already in the feed. Fortunately this doesn't break anything, and can be worked around manually by going to the new 'Torrents' tab and double-clicking any entries you want to download.

So all in all, the plugin is now pretty much bug-free and feature complete. As with the previous release, to install it, just dump the contents of the archive into '~/.config/deluge/plugins/RSS'. If you have been using the previous version, you'll need to delete feeds.conf and filters.conf from '~/.config/deluge' and re-enter your feeds and filters, otherwise you should be good to go.

Regarding the latest post on the homepage, I'd love to have the plugin included in 0.5.3, if the devs think it's up to scratch. I've added it to the dev wiki, and as before, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Peace,
SatNav

[irfan]

Nice !
I will use it :]

[markybob]

Regarding the latest post on the homepage, I'd love to have the plugin included in 0.5.3, if the devs think it's up to scratch. I've added it to the dev wiki, and as before, comments and suggestions are welcome.

ok, it's in the SVN and will be in 0.5.3 i tweaked the gui a little bit, but not much. good work, thanks. feel free to keep sending patch updates for it to me markybob@gmail.com

[SatNav]

Nice !
I will use it :]

Cool, thanks

ok, it's in the SVN and will be in 0.5.3

Awesome!

Cheers for the kind comments guys!

[zachtib]

Regarding the latest post on the homepage, I'd love to have the plugin included in 0.5.3, if the devs think it's up to scratch. I've added it to the dev wiki, and as before, comments and suggestions are welcome.

ok, it's in the SVN and will be in 0.5.3 i tweaked the gui a little bit, but not much. good work, thanks. feel free to keep sending patch updates for it to me markybob@gmail.com

I'm Iooking forward to trying it out once I get home today, and I'm also happy to include it in our 0.5.3 release

[SatNav]

I'm Iooking forward to trying it out once I get home today, and I'm also happy to include it in our 0.5.3 release

Awesome - hope you like it

[paulmoore]

Hey,

I would have to say that RSS implementation in Deluge is great. However there are some common and necessary options with other RSS bitcatchers (like Azureus and uTorrent) that aren't included in your RSS plugin.

First, it would be nice to filter (tv) feeds by episode number. (eg: Lost.3x22.avi, or Lost.S3E22.avi)

Second, it would be nice to filter feeds by a date in the title. For instance "The Daily Show" normally isn't listed by season and episode number, but by air date. To complicate things, that date format isn't in any way standardized. So you might get "TDS.07.16.07.Xvid.avi" as well as "Daily.Show.2007.16.Jul.avi"

The ability to exclude something with a filter.

Either full documentation on filter expressions or just make them easier to use. Azureus uses regular expressions that make it extremely powerful, but a pain in the a$$ to use. uTorrent: not as powerful, but much simpler.

A way to check if a user's filter code is valid when matched against a feed item.

The ability to set a default download directory specific to each feed.

Thanks for listening. I don't wanna be one of those douchbags that list only complaints without praise for what you've done so far. So...

Thanks for all your hard work on your project. I (hopefully as well as others) really appreciate your involvement on making a slick and usable tool.

Thanks again,
Paul Moore

[SatNav]

Hey Paul,

Thanks for the reply. I might take slight issue with your use of the word *necessary* (the plugin meets my needs perfectly as it is) but I very much appreciate your comments.

I can see the advantage of filtering tv shows by episode number and/or date (I'm an avid viewer of the daily show myself), and indeed advanced filtering options such as these feature quite highly on my 'to do' list. Though having said this, those kind of filters would be pretty tricky to code, and I haven't really thought too hard about them just yet.

The ability to exclude something with a filter.

This seems a bit of an odd one to me, and you may need to enlighten me a little here (maybe give an example or two), but if you check in the development forum a guy named Jorge Vargas is working on an RSS plugin with negative filtering, if thats what you mean.

full documentation on filter expressions

Well it's basically 100% literal. What you put in the box is searched for - case sensitive, everything. I had the choice of a straight-up search or regular expression, and went for box #1. But I have considered adding regex as an option and that'll probably appear before too long.

A way to check if a user's filter code is valid when matched against a feed item

well, not being funny, but I thought that's what I already did... :-/
edit: aaah, I see what you mean now. I hadn't thought of that, but it's not a bad idea. I'll probably implement it at some point

The ability to set a default download directory specific to each feed.

Yep - again that's on the 'to do' list. I don't know how long it'll take, since it'll most likely require slightly more communication with the deluge engine than the rest of the plugin - but it should get done eventually.

I don't wanna be one of those douchbags that...

No problem dude - it may be because I'm slightly drunk at this precise moment, but I'm happy to receive constructive criticism and hear what other people want from the plugin.

Once again, cheers for the comment,
SatNav

[tadpole]

I'm glad to see someone is working on an RSS plugin, but I'm having some problems with it. I'm not very good with Python, so take the diagnosis with a grain of salt, but I'll try

The first problem that plugin.py is using an enclosures attribute of the entries returned by feedparser. Changing the code from entry.enclosures[0].href to entry.links[0].href seems to fix the problem. Maybe a different version of feedparser.py is being used on your development machine than what is installed by the plugin? The problem occurs on both Ubuntu Feisty and a very fresh Gutsy tribe 2 install, with both deluge-0.5.2 (using the code posted here) and SVN.

The second problem is with feeds that don't include a timestamp in their entries (e.g., http://www.baka-updates.com/rss.php). It seems that the entries returned from feedparser aren't validated to make sure they contain all necessary information, and an exception is thrown when the (non-existent) timestamp is referenced, causing the plugin to fail not only to parse the subsequent entries in the feed, but subsequent feeds as well. I started to fix the problem, but it seems that the timestamp is tied very closely with the download history, and I didn't want to change too much.

And finally, some feature requests. Mostly echoes of the previous post, but what can I say--we want the same things. In descending order of importance:
* history based on episode number
* set a download directory (per-feed is overkill for me, but would work)
* filters applied retroactively to feeds, instead of only checking against new items
* exclude patterns (*cough* NoTV *cough*)

Anyways, thanks for the plugin. I'll try to remember to keep an aye on this thread, so let me know if you need more information.

[SatNav]

Hey,

It's funny you had a problem with 'enclosures', because I was originally using 'links', but one of my feeds (the diggnation podcast) was causing problems with it, so I changed it. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that some other feed is causing problems with 'enclosures'. Ah well, it shouldn't be too hard to check for both. It won't be different versions of feedparser.py, since the one that's packaged is the exact one I use (I don't have it installed on my system).

As for your second problem, I must admit it never even occured to me that there would be feeds without timestamps. The documentation for feedparser.py does mention that different feed providers differ greatly with the management of their feeds, but I didn't really take it that seriously - I guess that'll teach me. I'll have a play and see what I can do.

*history based on episode number - I'm not sure what you mean by this. Like episode number filtering?
*set a download directory - already got that on the list I was thinking per filter, but if left blank it'd just use the default.
*filters applied retroactively - thats another thats on the list - I imagine it'll be a button on the filters tab, thats the best way I can think of to do it.
*exclude patterns - I'll never understand the need for this - would it be subservient to one of the positive filters? I'm just not clear on how it's meant to work.

Cheers for the comments,
SatNav