Rebuilding XML when files are missing

[amingle4]

My current process for podcasts (in general) is to download a podcast to my phone, then listen to it when I get to it. I have a separate podcast server where every week it goes through and purges anything older than XX days old. Those older files remain in the XML, but if I was to go and try and download them, they of course wouldn't be there. But since they are locally on my phone, this is irrelevant to my use case.

With podsync, I tried doing the same thing - I have a task set up to go through weekly and purge anything older than XX days old. Sure enough, the correct files are purged. However, the next time it tries to build the XML, it can't update the feed because files it is expecting to be there are not there.

Sample error message:

failed to update feed: {URL} xml build failed: failed to obtain download URL for: {filename}.mp4: failed to check whether file exists: stat {file}: no such file or directory

The clean-up function which purges based on number of files is not exactly what I want, because there may be times where I have many videos in the queue, and there are weeks where I have just a few videos in the queue. So my preference would be to purge based on time (which I know has been discussed here in other issues). I currently have clean off on my feed.

What would be the best way to approach this? 2 options I have thought of:
-Turn off the database support? -> From my understanding of the code, this means that files still on the playlist would be re-downloaded every time, which would not be ideal. I would have to remember to clean up the playlist frequently as well.
-Turn off the error on the stat command and feed it a 'dummy' URL?

Issues that I have read through:
#167
#165
#170