just for the people (especially mumin and nostra) who might be overwhelmed otherwise, i have moved the most important last part of this followup to the top here ...More to the point, what is your advice to mumin, now that you have contradicted mine?
I think
i agreed with you and not contradicted you on how to fix the problem of restoring a deleted people record:
To fix the situation where a person has been accidentally deleted, update the movie they were previously associated with. Then update the person's record as well—that will restore them to any other movies they might have been associated with.
might work ... but depending on your method to work with people (I almost never download info for people), maybe the actor would have to be deleted again (with DEL, and NOT with CTRL+DEL) to make him invisible again, and even that would still leave lots of info in the invisible record.
all the contradictions are only related to how the problem occured in the first place and whether it always happens. And there was no talk yet about whether the "not auto-refreshing" (which btw also happens on other occasions like some editing/updating of movies etc) should be considered to be normal, only a feature, or a (minor) bug.
first and most important: mumin needs to answer nostra's questiondid you hold ctrl while deleting the person?
If yes, then just do not do it next time 
if no then I will need to take a look at the code...
second: if the answer is no, mumin might follow my tests to see whether it is only a misunderstanding because of the refresh problem or something, before nostra starts digging the code
third (and
to clarify whether rick and I really got different results): you might follow my steps exactly and tell what you found, and/or describe the steps you did while testing. I will gladly follow them, trying to reproduce your problem of always immediately deleting visible records, and report whether i get the same problem.
I don't know why you should so readily assume otherwise, but the behaviour I described is exactly as I described it.
you wrote:
- Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record.
and i did some tests and found that on my installation,
- people are
not always deleted completely, but only when they already were invisible or ctrl-del is used, and
- records were sometimes not shown temporarily although they really were not deleted.
since this seemed to contradict each other, i listed more details under wich conditions people were deleted on my system and under which conditions they were not, and which additional facts might make someone believe that records were visible or invisible although they had a different state.
In doing so, I also tried describing what i consider to be a bug (the refresh problem) since that might mislead people to think something happened or didn't happen which really didn't happen, causing them to mess up the database themselves.
It has nothing to do with failing to refresh the display. So why do you suppose we're observing different behaviour?
if you observe that records are always deleted and i observe that they are only deleted depending on some conditions, it
is different and not only
supposed, isn't it ?
to find out what might cause the differences, we would have to compare all our little differences in setup or what we did differently while testing. concerning my tests: did you do the same test which i described step by step ?
did you "download info on people with IMDB plugin" for some (grey or white) actor, refresh the display, then select the white record and push DEL (without holding control), confirm the deletion, no longer see the record in the list, refresh the display again and then see the record again? I did this at least 8-10 times for different and the same actors and
always found that they were
not deleted but only made invisible (with detailed info still intact).
If you did the same and found that always "
Deleting people doesn't just make them invisible, it actually deletes the record", we are in trouble like nostra said.
What, exactly, do you mean by "i don't auto-download people's info"?
Have you selected Show people added from movie credits?
If not, you comments may not be relevant to the way most of us the program.
yes, i was speaking of exactly that option, but no, i have
deselected it.
To limit the size of downloads and of the database and because i mostly want to use PVD not as replacement for using IMDB, but only to keep track offline of which DVDs I own, which movies i recorded from TV, what might be items for a wishlist, where i put them all and what i haven't watched yet, I have deselected all those additional options to
Show people added from movie credits and
Show movies added from Filmography. For now, it's good enough for me to have filmographies of those few actors or directors where i try to collect a set of their best movies and look everything else up on the web (if i start browsing people, i might end up anyplace in IMDB :-)
When we both do the same ("downloading people info" and "deleting people records"; you do it always and i did it just for this test) and for one of us records are always deleted but not for the other, we might see the same problem differently often, but it is irrelevant how we use the program normally to determine if there is some problem at all, EXCEPT if the above option would change the behaviour of PVD while deleting records.
