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Library Semantics

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mattkhan:
I agree with dtc, Library (capital L) is a specific noun in this context, a library (lower case l) can mean a variety of things.

dtc:

--- Quote from: JimH on December 01, 2023, 04:45:07 pm ---Library can be your library of media files.

Library can also mean MC's database of your files.

In JRiverville, it can be either.

--- End quote ---

With all due respect, that is not what the Wiki says and it is not how the word Library is normally used. In fact, people in this forum who think the media files are included in the Library are often corrected. Including media files in the term Library brings confusion to the term.

IMHO.

marko:
I agree with dtc. Since the birth of MC back in... 2002? the library and the media files have been explicitly two separate things.

If we have reached a point in time where the two become one, "library", then a lot of noise needs to be made about it, and, every page on the wiki that drives the point that these are separate things would need to be updated.

JimH:
No, they aren't one.  Library just has two different meanings in MC.

BryanC:
I've been wanting to make this topic for years so I'm glad that someone else already got the ball rolling.

Let's call a spade a space, MC is an amazing wrapper around an amazing database.  In 2023 most people off the street have a rough idea of what a database is. I really don't think that these concepts need to be abstracted or skeuomorphised away any longer, it just adds complexity to existing jargon. Users on Interact frequently conflate the "Library" with the MC database and their on-disk files and it leads to more confusion that it solves at this point.

What is a library? In this context it's a collection of catalogued items (i.e. the items themselves). So the whole concept of the MC "library" has never made a whole lot of sense (making a library backup that doesn't include a backup of the actual files).

If it were up to me, I would completely redefine the existing nomenclature. What we are really talking about most of the time in reference to the MC library is not the library but the MC database. We are connecting to remote databases, loading alternate databases, backing up databases, etc.

The library should refer to the "file library" of actual files on disk (and it would be clearest to new users to refer to it as a "file library"). The database should refer to MC's internal catalog. So if we want to make a complete copy (as part of the new feature) we would be downloading both the file library and the database. Maybe there is a singular term that could combine these but that's not for me to decide. You could define the "MC Library" as files (or file library) + database as Jim alludes to, but that actually contradicts the existing nomenclature as was pointed out.

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