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Comment by tomlong | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat interestingly, under the hood calibre seems to be a bunch of little tools, strung together by the UI:

Here's what's under calibre/bin

  calibre
  calibre-complete
  calibre-customize
  calibredb
  calibre-debug
  calibre-parallel
  calibre_postinstall
  calibre-server
  calibre-smtp
  cjpeg
  ebook-convert
  ebook-device
  ebook-edit
  ebook-meta
  ebook-polish
  ebook-viewer
  fetch-ebook-metadata
  jpegtran
  JxrDecApp
  lrf2lrs
  lrfviewer
  lrs2lrf
  markdown-calibre
  optipng
  pdfinfo
  pdftohtml
  pdftoppm
  web2disk

You can use many (possibly all) of these independently of the UI.

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If it helps to think of Calibre as a "toolkit," then, instead of a single monolithic app, I'm all for it.

It's funny, if they released a version of Calibre that had only the bins you mentioned and omitted the GUI entirely, it would probably be held in much higher esteem among the HN community.

I’d argue this is true in general: I once gave a presentation about a (IMO) pretty decent tool but made the mistake of demonstrating it with a UI that was usable but needed work. It got a lot worse of a reaction than an earlier and worse version of the same tool where I ran it from the command line.

Showing tools that work, CLI or not, is better than showing something that barely works. It is a very natural and logical explanation.

Thanks for mentioning this. I didn't know that Calibre packages its own optipng, a program for which there have been some security advisories in recent years. I hope Calibre keeps pace with upstream releases of these tools.

I installed it on one server that I only ssh to JUST to use that ebook-convert so I can read anything (epub, mobi, pdf, etc) on the command line. It's so easy to use, detects to- and from-formats from filenames and works on anything.

Poettering should learn from the design of this software.

Better he learn from Kovid than the other way around!

If you had spent 2 seconds looking at the source code to Calibre, you would not be praising it's codebase.

Also, systemd is not one binary. It's like 50 different binaries.

That's good design, right?

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