[mythtv] Using my main mythtv box for development

[Karl E. Jorgensen]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2007 at 12:42:19PM +1000, Matt Doran wrote:
> I'm interested in submitting a patch or two to mythtv, and wanted to 
> develop the patches against trunk.  But I need to develop of my one and 
> only myth box, which is currently running 0.20-fixes.  
> Developing/testing patches would be much easier if I was running trunk 
> ... but I use this box daily for all my TV watching and recording needs, 
> and it needs to be reasonably stable.

If you only want to touch the front end, you could set up a chroot
environment to do the development in.  This is a bit cumbersome to set
up (depending on your distribution) but will provide near-complete
isolation from your existing install. Things to note (apply salt as
necessary - I'm doing this from memory):

- To talk to X, you need your X authorisation cookie available inside
  the chroot environment - copying your $HOME/.Xauthority file would do
  the trick (each time the X server starts you'll need a new copy), or
  you could just bind-mount your home directory. 

- You might have to set DISPLAY to "localhost:0" rather than just ":0"
  to force the X connection to go over the network. Unless you
  bind-mount /tmp, so it can talk to the X server over unix domain
  sockets.

- lirc will not be available inside the chroot environment unless you
  bind-mount /dev

If you want to play with the back end, then you need to be able to run
two backends on the same box.  And then you might need two databases, as
the backend tends to upgrade the database when it appears out-of-date
(which could make the "WAF" backend somewhat confused...).

That's another kettle of fish (or is it "can of worms" ?)

Worst case: dual-boot two installations: one for WAF and one for
development. You can share /home (make sure that your user IDs are in
sync) and swap partition between the two installs, but databases and
recording directories should be kept separate. If you want better
separation, then we're talking two physically separate boxes...

> How many of you use trunk on your main box?  How's the stability?    Any 
> tips or things to look out for when running trunk on your main myth box?
Can't help you here...

> I'm happy to recompile, regularly to fix problems as they arise, etc ... 
> but my WAF would drop dramatically if there were too many issues!!  ;)

WAF is very important - I believe it's worth a bit of trouble to protect
that :-)

-- 
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl at jorgensen.org.uk  http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl at jorgensen.com     http://karl.jorgensen.com
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