Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Pending mask of Qt3 and MythTV

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On 02/24/2010 02:15 AM, Doug Goldstein wrote:
> My response was the arch teams haven't stabilized MythTV in years
> because none of them have a setup to test it, so please stabilize it.
> I'm running it on a stable machine.

Well, to their credit, you CAN'T stabilize a package if you can't test
it.  I can test it and stabilize it on amd64, but that's it.  If there
is an arch that nobody has a mythtv setup for testing on then the
solution is to drop the stable keyword entirely - not to just mark it
stable.

> As far as the news item goes, as I've said before. Its completely
> unnecessary since MythTV will handle notifying you properly if you
> need to do anything to your database. I can count more than a dozen
> people on Gentoo that have successfully done the conversion without
> issue.

Here is the problem I have with this:  doing the migration takes time.
Somebody who does an emerge -u world probably doesn't set aside an hour
or two to manually fix databases.  Anybody doing this for mythtv will at
best have a mythtv install that refuses to start until they spend time
doing database dumps, sed scripts, and reloads.  If for some reason the
mythbacked doesn't detect the problem and starts up anyway, then they'll
end up with partial database corruptions.

I think that if nothing else we should send out a news item warning
users that a major mythtv upgrade is coming and that they should
exercise care in upgrading it, setting aside time for database cleanup
if they are long-time users.  I'm completely open to revised wording,
but I don't feel comfortable stabilizing this for amd64 without any news
at all.

I do appreciate all you've done for mythtv, and the time crunch you are
in right now.  However, if I commit a keyword stabilization I need to be
accountable for the results.  I suspect the other arch teams feel
similarly - nobody wants to just commit something like this without
testing and good documentation.

How about this revised news item:

Title: MythTV 0.22 Upgrade Database Corruption
Author: Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>
Content-Type: text/plain
Posted: <date>
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 1.0
Display-If-Installed: <media-tv/mythtv-0.22

Due to an incompatibility between MythTV 0.21 and the default Gentoo 
MySQL configuration, it is likely that long-time MythTV users will have 
databases with a mixture of locale encodings.  If you upgrade to 0.22 
without following these directions carefully, you could end up with a 
database that contains errors that are extremely difficult to fix.

Note that not all mythtv users need to modify their databases, and this 
should only be performed at the time of the upgrade.  The guide below 
contains instructions that can be used to determine if this problem 
pertains to you.

Please see the MythTV Upgrade Guide for instructions:

     http://wiki.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding

Be sure to save a database backup before upgrading.  Also, be sure to
upgrade any other clients/backends you are using to 0.22 at the same 
time.  The upgrade instructions need to be followed once per database - 
individual client/backend upgrades do not require these steps.

If you do run into problems with your upgrade, there is a forum thread 
where you may be able to find help:

     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-816566-highlight-.html