The "Incomplete" directory is always in "Download"

First of all, it's possible to change the location of the temporary folder through the SABnzbd web interface, which can be accessed by choosing File -> Open Web Interface. But of course, LottaNZB users shouldn't need to know that.

It's indeed not such a wise choice to have the folder for temporary files fixed to ~/Downloads/Incomplete as you've said, the user might choose another location as the download folder and should generally not be concerned where temporary files are stored. The default value was simply copied from SABnzbd. If one were to hide the folder of incomplete downloads, it would go to ~/.local/share/sabnzbd/incomplete or ~/.sabnzbd/incomplete.

The question is whether there are situations where users would want to access the temporary files while the download is taking place. Failed downloads are placed in the download folder chosen by the user, prefixed with FAILED_. I don't see much incentive not to hide the temporary folder by default. Another question is whether it should be possible to change the location of the temporary folder through LottaNZB's UI. It would be easy to do so but I'm not sure whether this option deserves the space.

Thoughts on this issue are welcome!

I would rather hide this directory and not provide the UI for changing it. This wasn't here for the previous releases (due to HellaNZB) and no one asked for it, there is no reason to allow to configure it now.

What if the user runs out of space on his hard-drive, and/or would like to store his temp files on an external drive? Also, from personal experience, checking the incomplete files is sometimes useful for me (manually PAR2 checking, album cover checking, NFO or whatever).

Two solutions come to my mind:
1. Incomplete folder is stored in ~/.lottanzb/Incomplete ; UI provided to change this. Pro: invisible to user, no clutter in the Downloads folder. Cons: user might wonder where his downloads are going.
2. use the PREFIX_download scheme ; I don't really like that caps lock thing, so I would rather go with download (incomplete/failed/extracting). I'm not sure about parenthesis in folder names, but I think this is the way to go. Pro: an unique directory to get the actual content (only the name changes). Cons: an unique directory to get the actual content :).

Discussion still opened !

As far as I know, the "Incomplete" directory only contains the NZB that is currently downloading and therefore not finised. Once finished it always goes in the download folder you specified (prefixed with "FAILED_" if it failed). This is only a temporary folder, nothing should remain here.

Therefore I don't see the point of seeing this, it's the internal business of the software. In fact, if you want to change it you should use the SabNZB interface.

Again, I just don't want to have this folder in my "~/download/" folder. Beyond that, whether we should display an option or not to set it, it's pretty much the same to me :)

Severin, since you're developing it, the choice is yours. It's your call to decide whether you want a software that can be highly tuned or a software with few parameters.

I just changed the default location of the directory to ~/.sabnzbd/incomplete. There are valid concerns regarding this step, as indicated by Stéphane. If there isn't much space in the user's home folder, it is indeed a good idea to choose a location on another partition. Only a small fraction of users will probably be affected by this, which is why the experience should still be made smoother for the rest.

However, I'd still like to make it possible for people who are low on space in the "incomplete" directory to be made aware of the problem and provided with the means to fix it, but not by providing an option to choose the directory in the preferences UI. Instead, what do you think about the following:

When the free amount of space in ~/.sabnzbd/incomplete is less than 2 * max(download.size_left) (for all downloads) and the download folder is located on another partition (chosen by the user), then display a message (like [1]) suggesting the user to change the location of the "incomplete" directory using the web interface, while providing a link that opens the web interface.

[1] http://www.lottanzb.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/import-downloads.png

Thanks a lot for this fix :)

This message is a great idea.

You may want to check first that the available space of the Download directory is different than the Incomplete directory. Because if they are in the same partition (as most users do) this is a totally different message you should display: "Not enough space to download this".

Starting with SABnzbd 0.6 [1], failed downloads will not be moved from the "incomplete" folder to the download folder, so that the user is given the ability to fix the download using SABnzbd, e.g. by supplying an NZB file with additional PAR files. It might be possible that the same happens when a download is password-protected.

Of course, it would be very desirable to provide these recovery features in LottaNZB. Until this happens, it should at least be possible for the user to figure out where the failed download is located and to use the recovery features through the web interface.

[1] http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/introducing-0-6-0