UX: 'Maintenance → Automatic updates' duplicates the per-source model in Sources — unify the refresh schedule

[jozef2svrcek]

Summary

Two different screens now govern "keep my feed sources current," with overlapping backend jobs. Since the multi-source model (#40) moved sources into their own screen with per-source enable + auto-sync + manual sync, the older global Maintenance → Automatic updates schedule reads as duplicate functionality — e.g. it refreshes The Week in Chess, which is also managed under Sources.

Where they overlap

Maintenance → Automatic updates (MaintenancePanel.tsx ~L674):

• A toggle + "Check daily at HH:MM", persisted to the schedule table (enabled, daily_minute).
• Drives the daily update job (chess-db/src/jobs.rs ~L932), which loops every enabled feed (enabled_feeds), downloads + imports each, then indexes + normalises.

Sources (SourcesPanel.tsx):

• Per-source enable (with attribution ack), date window, Sync now (sources_sync job), and per-source status. TWIC and the other feeds live here.
• Enabling a source triggers auto-sync (scheduler C3), and thereafter the daily update keeps it current.

So the daily update job is essentially a scheduled batch of what sources_sync already does per source, and the cadence control lives on a different screen from where the sources themselves are managed.

Why it's confusing

• Unclear whether both are needed: does turning Automatic updates off stop TWIC refreshing? Is enabling a source under Sources already enough to keep it updated?
• Two status surfaces: the schedule's "last run / next check" (Maintenance) vs each source's "last sync" (Sources).
• Two code paths that refresh feeds (update vs sources_sync) that must be kept in step (date windows, dedup/index/normalise, the coalesced-maintenance work in Jobs: smart-queue maintenance — coalesce dedup + position index + normalise to run ONCE after all pending imports drain #131).

Proposed direction

Unify to one refresh model with a single source of truth:

• Reframe the "check daily at HH:MM" cadence as "how often enabled sources refresh" and surface it in (or linked from) the Sources screen, next to what it actually controls — not under generic Maintenance.
• Fold the update job into the per-source sync / auto-sync path (loop enabled sources → sources_sync → the single coalesced maintenance pass, Jobs: smart-queue maintenance — coalesce dedup + position index + normalise to run ONCE after all pending imports drain #131), so there's one mechanism and one status model rather than two.
• Keep Maintenance for genuine one-off DB operations (dedup/index/normalise/backup/resolve-fide), not recurring source refresh.

Related

• Support for more reference databases #40 (multi-source), C3 auto-sync, Jobs: smart-queue maintenance — coalesce dedup + position index + normalise to run ONCE after all pending imports drain #131 (coalesced maintenance), chess-db/src/scheduler.rs (the daily update scheduler).

Observed during testing: "Maintenance / Database / Automatic updates" looks like duplicate functionality with "Sources / The Week in Chess".

[jozef2svrcek]

Observed again during 0.7.x testing

The Scheduled update fired even though no TWIC (or any feed) updates were enabled in the wizard. Root cause is exactly the decoupling this issue describes: the daily update runs whenever schedule.enabled is true (its default) at daily_minute, independent of whether any source is enabled. With no feeds it used to be a near no-op (enabled_feeds empty → "nothing to update"), so it was invisible; now it does visible work (below), which is why it surfaced.

New wrinkle to account for before unifying

As of 0.7.0 (#162), the daily update job now also refreshes the local FIDE player list monthly — fide::refresh_due → download → load — before the feed loop, so it runs regardless of feeds. This matters for the proposed direction ("fold update into the per-source sync path"):

• Don't just drop the update job / disable it when no feeds are enabled, or the scheduled monthly FIDE refresh loses its trigger.
• The FIDE refresh is a global maintenance task, not a per-source feed sync, so unification should give it its own scheduled home (e.g. keep a lightweight daily tick that does FIDE-refresh-if-due + coalesced maintenance, and move feed refresh onto the per-source auto-sync path).

Still deferring the fix — noting it here so whoever tackles the unification doesn't accidentally strand the FIDE refresh.