Statuses

A work has a status: draft, scored, scheduled, released. You should almost never have to set it.

kilna works it out from what has actually happened. Score a work and it becomes scored. Give a release a slot in the calendar and it becomes scheduled. Mark that release as out and it becomes released. Delete the score again and it goes back to being a draft.

The alternative — a field you update by hand every time something moves — is where the predecessor of this app went wrong. Four different screens wrote to it, none of them consistently, and after a few months the word on a song had nothing to do with the song.

When you set it yourself

Pick a status from the list on a work’s Overview tab and it stays there. The automation stops touching that work entirely — not for that status, for any of them.

That is the point. A work you shelved is shelved even though it has a score and two planned releases; nothing in the data says “abandoned”, so nothing can derive it. The same goes for any judgement the facts cannot see.

The line under the field says which of the two is in charge: Follows what has happened while the automation owns it, Set by hand — the automation leaves it alone once you do. Follow the facts, beside that second one, hands it back and works the status out immediately.

Which word means what

The statuses are yours, from the profile — a novel goes draft, revised, scored, ready, published, and a podcast has recorded where music has nothing. So each status carries a derive role naming what it means to the automation, and the automation reads the role rather than the word.

A status whose role is manual — shelved in every built-in profile — is never set automatically. Rename Published to Out in the world and it keeps meaning “it went out”. See the profile document for the field itself.

Catching up all at once

Statuses set before the automation existed, or left behind while you worked elsewhere, can fall out of step. Data → Statuses shows exactly which works disagree with the facts, and what each would become:

Harbour lights    scored → scheduled
Paper boats       draft  → scheduled

Checking changes nothing. Restate applies what the list showed, and writes one line to History. Works whose status you set by hand are left out of both.

The dry run is not politeness. Restating in bulk is the one thing here with no undo behind it — the trash holds deleted things, not overwritten fields — so you see the list first.