[gentoo-dev] Pending mask of Qt3 and MythTV

[gentoo-dev] Pending mask of Qt3 and MythTV

[Ben de Groot]

Hi,

As the Gentoo Qt team has announced six months ago, Qt3 is about to be
masked now (see bug 283429). We sent another mail with a timeline at
the end of December. Most of the issues surrounding the mask and
removal of Qt3 have been solved. But we see ourselves confronted with
one remaining issue: MythTV. Its current stable version uses Qt3, but
there is a Qt4 version in testing. In all this time the MythTV
maintainers have not taken any action. On my initiative a stable
candidate was appointed and the result is in bug 299222. But the
upgrade procedure is non-trivial, possibly leading to irreparable
database corruption. As several users have warned, this upgrade needs
a news item and upgrade instructions. But the named maintainer has
indicated that he has no time to write these ( see
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=299222#c15 ).

As just masking stable MythTV, along the other remaining Qt3 ebuilds
in the tree, would give users the false impression they could
relatively safely upgrade to the ~arch version, the Qt team believes
this would be the improper way to proceed. We have decided to slightly
postpone the mask of Qt3, in order to give the MythTV team or the QA
team the opportunity to produce a news item about this issue. Seeing
that the MythTV team has not addressed this issue during the past
months, we strongly urge the QA team to step in.

If no action is taken soon, we see no other way than to protect the
users by masking the complete mythtv package. We hope this won't be
necessary.

Regards,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (qt, media, lxde, desktop-misc)
______________________________________________________

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

[Richard Freeman]

On 02/22/2010 12:25 AM, Ben de Groot wrote:
> If no action is taken soon, we see no other way than to protect the
> users by masking the complete mythtv package. We hope this won't be
> necessary.

Agreed none of the options are nice.  The mythtv wiki isn't a bad 
resource, how about this for a news item (I can commit if there are no 
objections - and be gentle as I just parsed the GLEP - also posted to 
the bug 299222):

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.

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.

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

[Doug Goldstein]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 11:25 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As the Gentoo Qt team has announced six months ago, Qt3 is about to be
> masked now (see bug 283429). We sent another mail with a timeline at
> the end of December. Most of the issues surrounding the mask and
> removal of Qt3 have been solved. But we see ourselves confronted with
> one remaining issue: MythTV. Its current stable version uses Qt3, but
> there is a Qt4 version in testing. In all this time the MythTV
> maintainers have not taken any action.

Incorrect. You came to me a few months ago and I told you I would not
and will not have time to mess with the package at all. I think I've
made that clear in past mailing list posts, discussions we've had, and
on bugzilla. Many people have spoken up about the situation and time
and time again I've said "please, take over the package. It needs to
be stabilized and a new unstable bump needs to happen." You took one
of those times to create a ticket saying you'd stabilize it, then
deferred to me and the arch teams. 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.

I do not have my Gentoo commit machine up and running right now. I've
only got my MythTV machines running x86 and amd64 with MythTV running
~arch for a while now. So I ask you once again, PLEASE just mark it
stable. SOMEONE. And quit accusing anyone of inaction.

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. The problem stems from people either not reading the
instructions when MythTV tells them they need to take action and read
the update guide. Or people stupidly reading the upgrade guide,
thinking "oh I'll upgrade my DB early" and upgrading their DB and then
running their old version. A news item will probably do more harm than
good and will result in a lot of partial corruptions, which we already
have one person on the bug you guys made for the news item already
doing.

-- 
Doug Goldstein

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

[Richard Freeman]

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

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

[Ben de Groot]

On 24 February 2010 08:15, Doug Goldstein <cardoe@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 11:25 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
[...]
>> one remaining issue: MythTV. Its current stable version uses Qt3, but
>> there is a Qt4 version in testing. In all this time the MythTV
>> maintainers have not taken any action.
>
> Incorrect. You came to me a few months ago and I told you I would not
> and will not have time to mess with the package at all. I think I've
> made that clear in past mailing list posts, discussions we've had, and
> on bugzilla. Many people have spoken up about the situation and time
> and time again I've said "please, take over the package. It needs to
> be stabilized and a new unstable bump needs to happen."

As we are all volunteers, I appreciate that you may not have time to
do what this package needs. That is not an accusation, just a
statement of facts. What you could maybe have done is reassign
this package to maintainer-needed, as that seems to be more
accurate. But it is co-assigned to the mythtv herd, and the other
herd members have also not helped out in this issue.

> My response was [...] please stabilize it. I'm running it on a stable
> machine. [...] So I ask you once again, PLEASE just mark it
> stable. SOMEONE.

Which is why we added arches to the bug for stabilization. But
then the issue came up that we really need a news item.

> 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.

A good number of people seem to disagree. I actually haven't
heard anyone saying we don't need a news item, apart from you.

But I'm happy to defer to QA, whatever they think is the best
solution.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux developer (qt, media, lxde, desktop-misc)
______________________________________________________